"Clever. Can you actually prosecute or does it just spook the cops?"

"If the cop doesn't have connections in the government, which they mostly don't, I can make sure it lands on the docket of someone who'll convict with enough evidence - not of murder, it's not murder with a red victim, but of excessive use of force and falsifying a police report and the latter'll bar you from jobs where you carry a gun."

"You see what I mean about you having more baked-in social problems. Human cops occasionally shoot people and there can be pressure from within the culture of cops protecting them but they don't, if pressed, go get all their relatives in the army to fuck you up about it - and you can in theory just jack up the police wage until culturally different people from the usual crop are interested, you don't have to draw them all from a single relatively homogeneous population -"

"A population selected for being violent assholes, as Isel will mutter when no one's listening. ...last time she said that I said 'hey, Makel's girlfriend's lovely'."

Snort. "Does she have a job?"

"Peka? She does sex work. I'm not thrilled about that but -" sigh.

"I suppose it's a little dubious, at least in counterfactual emotional distress. I should probably give you credit for having sorted out some things that took humans a while, used to be terrible about sex work. Also gay people, although differently than Elves because human attempts at conversion therapy do not in fact work."

"- it is even weirder to me that gay people is a popular thing to get upset about. What's the worry with sex workers, is it more particular than the monogamous-marriage-only rule..."

"You could tell a story about diseases and children growing up with absent parents - that happens, in species that aren't baby-crazy, I suppose if someone manages to have a child by a sex worker and the child is not whisked away by the government they're probably thrilled and show up to parent them, with you? - but it's mostly an outgrowth of the monogamy thing, which we had for vaguer and more schismed religious reasons, plus a status thing - if you're cool or whatever you're supposed to be able to do without paying for it -"

" - do people also not pay for, I don't know, moving services, because if you're cool your friends will do it for drinks and pizza? - there'd be a problem if, say, someone wasn't on birth control and got a sex worker pregnant and she didn't want an abortion and couldn't afford the credit, because we sterilize both parents of a child with no credit so you're in a position of having to pay for the credit or getting sterilized later. But you can avoid that by using birth control when having casual sex in the spring, and it's not specific to a sex worker."

"We do not have the status thing with moving like that but that's probably because people don't like helping you move even if you're very cool and theoretically people like having sex with cool folks. Casual non-transactional sex escaped stigma earlier - sex work wasn't very popular among humans with options, it was dangerous, but casual sex was popular among, like, college students, and while it could also be dangerous it was in a way that was easier to write off."

"Ah huh. Sex work is not particularly dangerous by the standards of grey professions. I wonder if it's more stigmatized places where it's orange, because it is unusually so for an orange job."

"One reason it was dangerous was that it was illegal, bit of a vicious cycle."

" - yes, that would do it. Wow.

Except when it comes to reds Amentan governments are mostly very pragmatic, I can't see something like that sticking around."

"How exactly do you get from 'reds do jobs no one else will, and we don't touch them' to 'casual murder'?"

"If reds strike there'll literally be bodies rotting in peoples' homes where they passed away in the night. They have a lot of leverage. They might think they can get away with things, they might touch things, and it's hard to describe how intolerable the idea is - the people in Voa who were putting their children to bed hungry because the food wasn't clean weren't posturing -"

"Did they believe they'd actually get sick? Humans who are starving will eat things they wouldn't normally eat."

"Some people did get sick. Psychosomatic, obviously, but still. I think blue and green coped better than everyone else so maybe they'd have eaten it if they'd have been surer they wouldn't get sick."

Sigh.

"So people are much happier if it's well-established that reds can't get away with anything, and then - are there any issues in human politics where maybe people'll privately acknowledge they're being - horrible, past where it's even strategic, but 'let's not be so harsh on child molesters' just plays terribly no matter what the actual relationship between current policy and ideal policy - so no one'll say anything -"

"Yeah, people even freak out about pornography for them even when no children are involved, there's only one direction you're politically allowed to go - I'm not up on this in more recent years, I try vaguely to keep up with human news but -"

Nod. "It's politically unrewarding to work on because everyone is stupid about it and you'll probably lose every battle you pick and you might just get people riled up enough to be stupider. So no one does anything about reds unless someone thinks of a convenient way to extract more from them - or to get rid of them - and when we contemplate that they riot, which makes people even more upset with them - how dare they, murdering unarmed roboticists in their homes in front of their families -"

Nod.

"I asked my sister-in-law to work on it because she doesn't want a political career and doesn't mind not being invited to any dinner parties. I think she's found it rewarding - she's gotten a fair bit done -"

"The cameras?"