It's a structural failure. Whoever is currently in power only violates the human rights of the people they don't care about, and the party out of power at a given time may care about them but isn't contemporaneously in power to stop it.

The next time they play musical chairs the people being violated may change but the incentives don't.

You might imagine someone having the forethought to consider that someone else might be in power at some future point and put mechanisms in place to constrain their abuses. Modern politicians appear resistant to this logic.

The upholding and expansion of human rights becomes a serious part of any policy platform if voters make it a priority for whom they choose as their elected officials. In this space I would argue there is room for independents to steal votes from incumbents. As long as everyone sticks to red and blue teams, there's no way to fight entrenched conflicts of interest.

That's an interesting idea but "freedom of press" is a relatively new right by historical standards and is not widely accepted even now because it's counter to many governments' interests. The very concept is based in "Natural Law" (stemming from Aristotle, Roman tradition, etc) so not universal.

Therefore, the argument would be that it's not a "human right" but mostly a "Western right"

I'd bet on it getting worse from here.

> That's an interesting idea but "freedom of press" is a relatively new right by historical standards

Literally the first amendment (1789):

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There is no freedom of speech according to the Supreme Court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debs_v._United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_%2776_(1917_film...

I have no clue why this would be downvoted. The Supreme Court upheld the decision to jail someone for ten years for making an anti-war speech, based on the Espionage Act, which is the ancestor of the act that prevents Snowden from receiving a fair trial.

According to the article, Debs' sentence was upheld because it was found that the intent of his message was prevent the war.

By the way, the activist that was sentenced to ten years in jail for arguing against war also got a million votes for the presidency, so this is a case of supression of political candidates because of their speech and political activity.

If you disagree, instead of just downvoting factual statements you disagree with, you should comment to correct them or state why they are in bad form.

Presumably the lack of any contextualizing verbage. Like zero effort to connect the evidence presented with the assertion.

Notably the evidence presented has plain gaps. Consider the second link: "Goldstein's attorneys were unable to argue for protection under the First Amendment because the Supreme Court had ruled in 1915 that movies lacked such protection. (That ruling was overturned in 1952.)" That final parenthetical is critical because it suggests that a modern court would not rule the same way the court did in 1915 given similar facts.

To be clear, I don't have enough context to evaluate the merits of the statement in full just noting why it may have come across as glib and hence downvoted.

If you completely disregard the first link, then this conclusion does make sense, but the

That said, yeah I'd agree that there wasn't a lot of effort, but the first link reealllyyyyyyy speaks for itself here.

Human rights is a bi-partisan issue. Bringing human rights, democracy and freedom to Iraq (insert any other non-white country) has always been a bi-partisan issue. Ask the Vietnamese or Filipinos or Native Americans or anywhere else liberated....

> Ask the Vietnamese or Filipinos or Native Americans or anywhere else liberated....

The US didn't even pretend to liberate any of those groups except maybe the Filipinos.

They claimed to defend one set of Vietnamese against another, and didn't even pretend the Indian Wars were for the good of Native Americans.

> Ask the Vietnamese or Filipinos or Native Americans or anywhere else liberated....

The Filipinos were actually quite happy the first (Spanish-American War) and third time (World War II). The second time (Filipino-American War), not so much.

I'll ask the Bosnians, or the Koreans what they think....

We do ourselves a disservice to pretend that every intervention has been a massive failure or worse. It abdicates the specific responsibility of those waging specific wars and invites us to ignore international tragedy.

Citing any WWII action is dubious at best. And South Korea was a dictatorship in the time afterwards so not exactly a paragon of freedom. If your argument hinges on the Kosovo air war as proof that the US war intervention isn't a default failure, then you've already lost the argument.

If your standard is perfection you’ll always be disappointed.

Suffice to say that both Taiwan and South Korea would not be leading democracies in Asia without US intervention. Yes, both were dictatorships initially.

Are you arguing it would be better if North Korea were running the whole peninsula? And China controlled Taiwan?