"Well, damn. I can hang glide. I can do, like, most sporty activities that don't require significant walking or balance, I tried a lot of them, but not being desperately handicapped at a thing doesn't mean you can do it for a living -" Sigh.

"Having you be grey is nuts. Not that the caste system's not stupid in general, it is, but that specifically is nuts."

"I noticed."

"Sorry. - I guess you won't have to worry about it going forwards but still."

"I interpreted him as offering to disappear the plagiarism charge and my current out of caste income investigation, I did not understand him to be saying that I can switch to full time political analysis and drop crime and sports."

" - okay but do you want him to say that, because we could tell him to."

"How much of this is 'you have his ear and he thinks you know what you're talking about' and how much of it is 'you will otherwise turn him into a hosta'?"

"It's mostly Timothy who deals with him because they match and I cannot quite follow their dynamic honestly."

"It's cordial but I don't know if it's friendly. I do not think it ever involves Aitim refusing to do things but sometimes it involves him persuading Timothy that they're not actually the best way to get what he wants."

"It is not necessary to extort any politicians to arrange that I don't have to follow arcball any more."

"Okay."

"But thank you for the offer."

"We can ask him if there's any preexisting loopholes you could thread."

"I guess if it was going to come up anyway."

"...are you bothered by us extorting your politician?"

"I would be bothered if anyone were turned into a hosta over the content of my blog."

"What is a hosta?"

"It's a plant."

"Not sure if this makes it better or worse but the stakes Timothy and Aitim are playing for are whether we let Amentans stay on this planet, it's not much about personal threats."

"It would also bother me if millions of colonists were displaced over the contents of my blog."

"It's not their planet."

"...it would bother me if millions of colonists' fates depended on the contents of my blog?"

Sigh. Nod.

"I will absolutely buy that the meeting of the species should have gone differently in a perfect world, and it's even plausible that there are politically realistic options that Aitim or his subordinates missed that would have improved matters, but I think it's chauvinistic to say it's inherently better for humans to colonize and kill each other than for aliens to do it with less loss of life. I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe that intra-species colonization projects are more humane."

"So humans figuring things out on our own is certainly better in some respects - population controls would be an outrageously inhumane and destructive imposition that might well drive us extinct inside a century, and human societies would never impose them - the caste system is absurd and humans would never impose it - pollution doesn't exist and the extent to which you want to impose your procedures to manage is firstly ridiculous and secondly completely destroys tons of valuable associated cultural practices surrounding, like, death and loss and stuff. There are a bunch of ways you're worse specifically because you're a different species and your policies are good for you and not for us. And I think humanity was in - an experimental stage with respect to values, about which it was not completely insane to believe that good values would win out, and now that's completely subsumed by Amentan values, which are okay in some ways but in others I think are objectively much worse, and which are all much harder to move because you've built more on top of them.

And I think human polities pretty rarely completely subsume and annihilate another one. If you care about your society continuing to exist- and lots of people do - then occasional partial incursions are better than a single but total one even if the death toll is higher from the partial ones. And I can't personally imagine caring about that more than lives but lots and lots and lots of people do and - saying their preferences don't count because they are dumb seems like saying it doesn't matter whether Amentans get babies because the amount you want babies is objectively ridiculous. Their faiths, their countries, their kings, their constitutions and their freedoms and rule by people who are of the same species as them - those matter to some humans the way babies matter to you, they really do.

No human is ever going to make it anywhere in your government, incidentally, because I get the sense Aitim is young for his level of power and got there through family connections and he's at the age where Muggles start to experience cognitive decline even if they led a perfectly healthy life and had good sanitation. They will never have a government headed by people who understand them on even a basic level, who have any of the same drives as them, who could conceivably have a life like theirs.

And, like, if we make you leave it wouldn't be with an 'okay and go ahead and kill the indigenous people again', we'd probably keep a single world government with the resources to prevent wars and grant everyone with a secession claim independence and keep the trains so people can leave if their little state's not suiting them."