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I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al. If there were a policy on the table, with good evidence suggested would mitigate one of those, at reasonable cost, without being liable to cause greater harm of some sort, I would be all ears. Do you know of one? Absent that, I don't think this is relevant unless it is just a thought experiment. If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...
We can't spend 20% of GDP mitigating climate change, 20% mitigating nuclear war, 20% mitigating an asteroid impact, 20% mitigating superbugs, 20% mitigating super-volcanoes, and 20% mitigating runaway AI -- because that adds up to 120%. Would you spend 10% on each one? I bet I can name four more plausible humanity-ending disasters before you post your answer. There is an interminable list of national and global disasters that are plausible within a few decades, and from that I infer that paying heavy costs to mitigate merely-plausible disasters is bad for our health and welfare -- unless some particular disaster is particularly plausible, and some particular plan can be shown to mitigate it without doing more harm than good.
To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... No, wait, there wouldn't be any inmates, because there wouldn't be any crime, because we'd all be drinking free soda pop and eating rainbow stew for every meal. But, since we don't have a crystal ball or a magic genie, some things can be achieved in a shorter time frame than others. The policy of (1) not housing trans women sex offenders in women's prisons is an issue of living debate which is short-term achievable, while the policy of (2) having a humane prison system is not. If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women. Sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, but that's not an egg I'm willing to break.
To the meta-level point, I don't have data for the US, but in the UK only about 15% of people firmly believe that trans women sex offenders with penises should be housed in women's prisons [source]. That is about the same as the percentage of Americans who believed that Elvis might still be alive in 2017 [source]. I don't have anything against either the trans-women-are-women crowd or the Elvis-is-alive crowd, but I also don't think I am obliged to consider their beliefs morally tenable or epistemically plausible. If I am talking directly with someone who believes a certain thing, I would politely entertain that thing -- but I can't entertain everything all the time just because somebody somewhere believes it. Some of my beliefs are out of the picture for other people, and vice versa, and I am OK with that. What I'm saying is that some charity is warranted here -- and I think your life would be better if you relax and stop being jarred when people, who are not speaking to you directly, are dismissive of things you believe, especially when you know to be on the fringe. Maybe you're right, even though almost everyone laughs off your theory, like Nikola Tesla or Alfred Wegener -- but even if you're right, it doesn't pay to get wound up about it.
It was a thought experiment, yes. I'm not particularly concerned about short-term human extinction from climate change myself - my irritation with right-wingers' tendency to hedge and obfuscate on whether it's real at all has more in common with HBD types' very understandable annoyance with progressives who try to change the subject or discredit the science, rather than bite the bullet of "yes, the science says what you think it says, but your idea of what to do about it is still bad". My position on climate change, roughly expressed, is that it is obviously real bad, and obviously a very worrying crisis even in cautious estimates of how bad it will get; but, equally obviously, that private individuals' behavior, especially in the West, is a drop in the bucket, to the extent that it is a waste of energy - pun surprisingly not intended - to guilt-trip them about their personal carbon footprint or whatever. I would like more right-wingers to say this head-on and stop with the bullshit about "well, maybe it isn't completely human-caused, who's to say". It's not the point. I'm not accusing you of that particular epistemological sin but I see it a lot, and conversely I see a lot of, to my mind, completely unwarranted "har, har, woke buzzword, brainwashed morons" sneering whenever someone acknowledges man-made climate change as A Bad, Obviously Real Thing That Is Happening, whatever policies they recommend.
But as for everything after your "but", well… insert the Winston Churchill joke about haggling and prostitution. It seems there are crises of sufficient urgency that you are willing to entertain the validity of government action funded by taxation, provided the policy looks promising. Why is the death of humanity by hypothetical runaway climate change on that list, but not the preventable deaths of thousands of private citizens for lack of affordable healthcare? And either way, haven't we already gotten rather afield from a clean position where our disagreement is not on the facts, but on what it is morally acceptable for the government to do about the facts? There seem to be several points of confusion here.
If you like.
I don't think you actually need a magic genie to prevent 99% of prison rapes.
You may or may not need a kind of a crystal ball, but it's a kind we know how to make!It's not a uniquely hard problem - it is a problem that there has been very little political will to solve because a lot of people not-so-secretly want prisoners to suffer above and beyond being deprived of their liberty, and a lot more people don't really care about prisoners' welfare very much compared to other issues even if they'd marginally support improvements to their condition. I don't think it's remotely fair to compare the problem of "stop prison rape" to the problem of "stop all crime everywhere": the whole point of prison is that it is a controlled, tightly-monitored closed-system.Yes, creating "a humane prison system" in all respects is a taller order, but rapes are the one thing that the presence or absence of trans inmates has an influence on. I would be happy with first solving the narrow problem of stopping the rapes, then allowing trans women into female prisons, then going back to the drawing board to draft a more ambitious, wholesale prison reform. And I reckon you could achieve the first two simultaneously, as two clauses of the same bill. Hell, if you wanted to be really kludgy about it, you could even set up special security measures for trans women inmates, without yet tackling the broader problem of prison rape, to guarantee that the addition of the trans women doesn't move the needle. Why not?
But also… even if you couldn't - even if it turns out that, in terms of practical implementation, the only sane way to get trans women in prison to work is ten years down the line after we complete wholesale prison reform - surely I'm allowed to state what my endgame is? When I say everyone should have guaranteed healthcare, I don't expect to snap my fingers and make it happen overnight. All sorts of things need to be thought through and organized, all sorts of sub-reforms and necessary steps introduced into law, before we get where we're going. I understand that, you understand that I understand that. I'm still allowed to say I "support universal healthcare". Why shouldn't I say, in general terms, that I "support trans women being allowed into women's prisons" even if I acknowledge, or acknowledge the possibility, that this aim can only be reached after other reforms I also want go through?
EDIT: this has no bearing on the meta argument(s) but I also remembered that there is another prong to the ethical cost-benefit analysis here, which I elided in my first message on the topic because unlike the "the state shouldn't be throwing its hands up and saying 'rapists gonna rape' in the first place" thing, it has nothing to do with my feelings on the government's right to inflict violence on its citizens. Namely: aren't trans women - commonly regarded as highly effeminate men - very likely to be raped themselves in men's prisons? Doesn't it at least seem worth investigating that, in expectation, all else being equal, putting a trans woman in a men's prison might be more likely to result in rape than putting her in a women's prison - because the trans woman in the women's prison may or may not be interested in raping women, but it is all but guaranteed that at least one man in the men's prison will be interested in raping a sissy?
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