pigeonburger
11mo ago
There shouldn't be a strategy. Just make sure that doctors are liable when their willingness to go along with a patient's wishes crosses the line into malpractice, but other than that, it's worth the tradeoffs. The Covid response should have made that clear, especially around alternative treatment protocols (HCQ, ivermectin). Even if these were clearly not killing anyone (when prescribed and not taken by idiots who can't figure out dosage), and could conceivably have benefits, western government went above and beyond to stop people from taking them, or discredit doctors who prescribed them, not because of medical harm but because they needed to assert narrative control and that narrative was "No reasonable doctor believes in those treatments, don't even argue about it, shut up, stay at home and follow orders". If I recall they also in some places pressured pharmacists to not fulfill prescriptions for them. Governments will use and abuse any ability to insert themselves in the relationship between doctors and patients to the fullest, even if for political purposes and not medical purposes.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
I don't think there is necessarily a link between "trans being real" (which I assume means some people having hormonal or brain imbalances that mean they will never feel comfortable being identified as their birth sex) and being reliably able to identify it in young malleable children.
It's very realistic to me that it could be a real phenomenon but the malleability of young minds means it cannot be reliably diagnosed before a certain sexual/cognitive threshold.
Think of the nazguls as leaders and special ops. They're good one on one fighters, and can serve as force multipliers when leading troops (through inspiration or terror), but in the north, they're in enemy territory.
Our gamer minds have been infected by RPGs into seeing power scaling by orders of magnitude, your hero starting as a level 1 with tens of hitpoints and finishing at level 99 with tens of thousands of hitpoints and no reasonable numbers of lvl 1 characters could even come close to representing a serious threat to it. But Tolkien probably had something more like Dark Souls scaling in mind, where super powerful characters are a couple of times more powerful than starting characters, but even beginning trash mobs in the right situation and in the right numbers can still be a credible threat. Aragorn is a powerful fighter and would be almost guaranteed to win a 1 on 1 fight against any other characters weaker than the Lich King or an ancient elf. But I don't think Tolkien had in mind that if, say, 10 average gondorian guardsmen surprise attacked Aragorn their swords would essentially bounce off of him because they're too weak and he's too powerful. Or that he could solo the entire Shire in an open fight. Or think of Boromir's fate; he was supposed to be one of the most powerful human warriors out there, and I think it's probably fair to assume he would have been at least a match for one nazgul that isn't the Lich King, as that was the point of opposing 9 members of the Fellowship to the 9 riders. He was killed not in a fight against another "unique" named enemy, but just tens of orcs/uruk hai.
So your nazguls, if they didn't act covertly, would risk facing a couple of hundred strong hobbit militia, and that's just wasteful use of elite special forces or officers.
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