"Linguistically?"

"Yes. Can you try another phrasing?"

"Like - you don't just - conquer places and install AIs and tax them and implement laws necessary for trade and migration and install plumbing where plumbing is not. You do all that and you make them learn Radchaai, take standardized tests, and wear gloves - the gloves thing keeps coming up, I know it must seem like a weird thing to harp on but it's an incredibly bizarre and inconvenient taboo from the perspective of our-era Earth, I don't think I'd ever heard of it before, and you have trillions of people doing it."

"I think I actually don't understand and it's not just the vocabulary. Those are - neutral things, right?"

"Uh - well I'm in fact pretty annoyed about the gloves on Xander's be-"

"What?"

"Mentioning you not addressing you - behalf, but yes, they're neutral things, it's making people do them that isn't."

"If you go slower then there's more violence and less migration and people don't see themselves as one unified people nearly as much. There are lots of things that don't need to change, but if something does need to change it works much better to just announce the change."

"I... can understand that this would create an incentive gradient in that direction."

"I take it your society does have a taboo on going around unclothed?"

"Yes. There's also a - collection of cultures some members of which live in our own, that requires covered hair for women specifically, which isn't one of our modesty taboos but would be way less annoying to accommodate, we're not just bristling at new modesty taboos, the gloves thing is specifically annoying mostly to Alex because I have magic powers."

"It seems significantly more practical than one about hair, though, since it affects disease transmission so dramatically."

"Does it really? That sounds like the kind of thing that might be confounded but maybe you've got great data on it."

"It does, gloves are mandatory for lots of professions even in most societies that don't consider them a modesty requirement. I'm sorry it's hard on Xander. I do think it'll be a pretty short adjustment period."

"Earth doctors wear specifically latex or... something that's like latex except fewer people are allergic to it but the name escapes me... gloves sometimes but I wouldn't have guessed regular cloth ones would help and would've believed someone who told me they'd make it worse."

"The fabric does matter but the ones sold or distributed here are all ones demonstrated beneficial."

"Oh. Possibly I should imitate a real fabric instead of making things up magically. I will look into that later. Anyway, the gloves thing is a distraction from the cultural hegemony thing, you don't seem to - value cultural pluralism at all? Except for the weird pantheon syncretism thing you have going on religionwise, which I'm frankly astonished works as well as it seems to to the point that I suspect the sources I'm reading of being filtered at some level of remove or other."

"There's also variance in family structures, local political institutions, approaches to education and child-raising, norms around retirement and the role of the elderly..."

"And those things get left alone when you roll in somewhere new?"

"All that works fine. In practice some traditions are stickier than others but there's no political pressure against them."

"Okay. It may not be as bad as it looks."

"I'm sorry that it looks so worrying."

"I didn't expect a thousands-of-years-old empire to have arranged itself to look innocent to time traveling dimension hoppers."

"No. But - I'd like most people from most places to see this and think they can raise children here, live out a couple of centuries, write a book, develop an odd hobby, decide what the best flavor of tea is."

"The other thing that's really concerning is the reeducation thing."