Unfortunately you do not have to look to the past or the other side of the globe to find an epidemic of false confessions.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/false-confessions...
But who do these public defenders identify with? They went to law school too, they passed the bar too. Their careers 15 years from now will look much like the prosecutors' careers. Hell, they might be sitting behind a bench, they're on the right career track.
If they identify with the other lawyers and the judges, then they might not be putting any effort into it at all. They might instead be in the business of conducting their "clients" through the plea bargain pipeline, and act as if their duties primarily revolve around making certain that pipeline doesn't get clogged up.
This wouldn't be all public defenders, mind you. But even a minor fraction of public defenders acting in this way would be horrific.
I appreciate the downvote though.
https://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/content.cfm/whats_the_ma...
Moving on…
The GP quoted the article and found interesting anecdotes of said quote in history and brought them into the discussion with background information backing up the anecdotes. That’s interesting and additive to the discussion! Your comment did none of that except to slander another side of the world. This is not to say that there are not examples that would support your point, you just apparently don’t feel the need to add anything more!
Working with you on being a better citizen of society (please update your terminology…) is also not interesting or additive to this thread. So I am going to leave it at that. Have a nice day.
I think the whole charge of "whataboutism" is pretty bankrupt for reasons I think this article pretty accurately sums up: https://theoutline.com/post/8610/united-states-russia-whatab...
> Try to imagine the following world: the Chinese Communist Party accuses the U.S. of crimes against humanity in the Middle East, and Washington does not turn around and say something like, “What are you talking about! You have one million people in re-education camps in the Xinjiang Province!” In this imaginary world, I guess, US officials would respect the fact that China is only talking about the Middle East right now, and out of politeness refuse to talk about anything else. To do so would be crude whataboutism.
> Can you imagine that happening? Of course not. English-language commentators would contest the right of Xi Jinping to set the terms of the debate, and they’d use the opportunity to draw attention to human rights violations in China, which would be a good thing. Because, I think, it’s good when we expose and condemn any crimes against humanity, no matter the motivations for the revelation.
> Let’s try an arena much smaller than the geopolitical. What if a man comes home, and says to his wife:
> “Susan, you didn’t take out the trash!” he says.
> “Brad, you have never taken out the trash once in your life,” she replies.
> Would it be fair for him to turn, smugly clutching a copy of The Economist, and say, “Susan, this is not about me. I can’t believe you are doing whataboutism”?
Other than that, yes, it's good to expose abuses (as long as over-exposure isn't being used to swamp out public awareness or caring of other abuses).
Pointing out the thing Western researchers were researching about in the West on Western subjects might happen in the West: extreme, egrecious, purely churlish whataboutism!