" - that seems reasonable for Muggles. Is that what the people who don't like you dislike you for?"

"I mean, we helped Tapa with the war against Voa but we were pretty okay with Voa after that... I'm sure lots of people have personal grievances because we're hard to swap into, initially for being patrilineal and now because we're doing the guest worker program instead of taking immigration... Orvara might be annoyed with us but that's about reds, Biyan's a Ceneish protectorate now so they don't count... Anitam is pretty high-corruption but that's not the sort of thing that makes you internationally unpopular really..."

"Oh, are there places where Aitim couldn't just decide whether crimes get prosecuted off whether it serves his goals with respect to public opinion."

"Yes, there are places where having magically suborned the planetary governor wouldn't give you nearly as much fine control."

"That seems better, convenient though it is."

"Has its advantages."

"I wonder if Aitim likes it this way - or, uh, did before we got him - or just doesn't know how to change it."

"I don't know, I really don't have nearly as much personal access to or information about him as you do."

Nod. "Everyone knows Timothy and he likes it that way but there just aren't all that many of us, by comparison."

"What would it take to convince you not to displace the Amentans here?"

"It's not really our unilateral decision. ...if you stopped even working towards population controls, credibly promised never to impose the caste system, abolished the death penalty - Aitim's working on that one - and figured out some sort of co-governance system where humans could be ruled by humans, and if you were definitely making yourself useful everywhere else instead of being such an aggressively mixed blessing, and if you were managing with whatever combination of potions and hybridizations with Muggles to keep your own population to a level where it didn't inevitably in the long run bring you into conflict with humans - maybe just agree to grow slower than us - then I bet there'd be a way to make it work."

"...not your unilateral decision because at any time other wizards may rear their heads or because you need to get Timothy to agree or -?"

"Other wizards will probably eventually notice that it's entertaining how the world now has a single point of failure vulnerable to mind-control curses but I don't think they're especially likely to use that to make Amentans leave the planet. Timothy and Michael and Theodore and Miranda and probably Karen and my father would need to agree, in terms of what we specifically would end up doing."

"Sorry what did -"

"We are very scary and I will get you a book on defensive mental exercises."

"Kinda missed the rest of what you said after 'mind control curses'."

"Not many people can do that one and Timothy taught Aitim how to shake it off anyway. Uh, I said the people currently planning to eventually make you all leave, and who'd need to be persuaded otherwise, would be Timothy and Michael and Theodore and me and Miranda and probably Karen - Timothy's girlfriend - and possibly my father but he likes his counterpart a lot and is focused on figuring out how to spruce up Mars for you, I don't think he'd be the holdout."

"What I think you're doing here is adding some extra value to 'human governance' that isn't served by doing any particular thing, just by being human, except that occasionally you'll point at something we've done or might do and go 'see, that's why it has to be humans'."

 " - so first thing it actually does matter to people, independent of other considerations, that their rulers are not aliens who care about unfathomable alien things that don't matter. You keep going 'but that's a stupid preference' but, again, it is not nearly as stupid as your obsessive babies preference or your pollution preference and when it comes to your things you never go 'it sounds like you just care about a stupid thing, have you considered just not getting what you want since it's stupid that you want it?'

Second thing is that lots of people care about actually being able to influence or play a role in their government. That's never going to be true of Muggles under Amentan rule, they die too young. 

Third thing - wizards are mostly not poor, and have birth control, and can pretty much handle themselves in most situations that might happen to them. That makes us very different from current Muggles but I think kind of similar to how Muggles might be in a richer society. And wizarding society is mind-bogglingly different from Amentan society, across more axes than I think I can really enumerate - and maybe Anitam's different, but you didn't say for example 'oh, yeah, most countries don't keep a detailed list of everyone's name and address but we do that' or 'oh, yeah, most societies don't pay for and mandate education but we do that', or 'oh, yeah, most countries don't have governments powerful enough to import millions of people for infrastructure projects and ordered to keep population controls a secret, but we do that' or definitely not 'oh, yeah, most countries kind of barely have a government except for population controls'.

The wizarding world has class divisions, but it's a flexible thing you can win at if you want to play it, Hogwarts is progressive for taking Muggleborns but there's no school that wouldn't take the children of potionmakers. There are very few laws and everything that doesn't absolutely have to be a law is none of the government's business. The idea you'd get arrested for 'disturbing the peace' over anything short of 'blew up some Diagon Alley' is completely nonsensical. The idea that keeping things clean is the government's problem is completely nonsensical. I think that because humans are different, human governments look different, and will be better at governing humans, and haven't shown this yet because they have never had anywhere near the resources you can bring to bear on it. Even with tons and tons of resources and the ability to completely end war Amentans are only mildly better than what preceded them. When we talk to our Muggle in-laws, they are praying every night that God makes you go away and gives dominion over the Earth to humans, and they're not insulated like wizards were from the bad things about how it was before.

We have genders. Amentans are bad at tackling gender-related problems more complicated than 'women aren't allowed to do anything' because you really don't get it, and there are in fact gender-related problems more complicated than 'women aren't allowed to do anything' and I do not expect an Amentan government to ever be equipped to manage that. I bet there are other things like that which Amentans are bad at.

Amentans have an ideological belief that bad people should be stopped from reproducing and good people encouraged to reproduce. We don't, really, have that and I have not the slightest desire to have us pick it up and I bet it's contagious with cultural contact. 

So, yes, I think humans should be ruled by humans and that other things equal this would be vastly better and even without other things equal it's probably somewhat better."

"I'd actually be okay with being rid of my pollution instinct, I think I'm conscientious enough to manage without it. As long as it's still there it's definitely not a point of compromise unless you're comfortable with torture."

"I think you should enforce whatever rules you want on your own territory and that when you ban people from visiting the graves of their dead children without taking a five-hour shower afterwards you will be committing a great evil that you cannot even understand to be evil and that any human ruler would understand to be evil."

"I also think less of this is a matter of species than you seem to believe. We have one landmass and we've had the internet for fifty years and it's barely out of living memory the time a single empire ruled most of the people in the world. We're an older civilization. We've homogenized but there are other cultures we can inhabit and it's hardly impossible we could adapt in time to something more humanlike."

"But you're just going to get more entrenched, and we'll never actually know what would have come out of the values and the governments that humans stitch together for themselves. You homogenized and now you want to assimilate more societies into your homogenization and lose whatever they would have come up with on their own."

"And I might just care more about the previous death rate of nonmagical humans."

"Oh, that was bad. If I had to pick - this or you not finding us - I pick this. ...though also my father was working on reconstructing the Philosopher's Stone before he had to switch gears to Mars terraforming. But for the long term, one of the necessary conditions for letting Amentans stay is a human government."