Remember the sixpencee child slave thing? What happened there, exactly? Was the kid freed? No? They were just run off the website? OK so what good exactly did that do?

Remember the bone stealing witch? What exactly did that witchhunt accomplish? The person got arrested, oh that's great, the american justice system surely rectified the situation

And again, those are instances where the accusations were true and involved real substantive harm to another person. We used to joke on here how callout posts were shit like "receipts below: [several paragraphs of petty fandom drama] [three paragraphs of petty interpersonal drama involving cheating on partners or stealing food out of the fridge or something] [fabricated evidence that the person is responsible for the murder of JonBenét Ramsey]"

And that was back in the 2010s. The meta has changed. Callouts used to be a tool people used to point out actual harm a person had done, rarely, and more commonly were used as a means of bullying somebody over petty drama. Nowadays they're used to manufacture outrage and harassment against marginalized populations. They are a weapon bigots use to turn us against each other. A few manufactured accusations here, some out of context or clipped screenshots there, and people who should be standing in solidarity with each other against white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, are instead devouring each other.

It's sinister as shit, dude, and people will still share these accusations without a second thought. So, why? What is the point? What's the best case scenario here? Raising "awareness?" what the fuck is that supposed to accomplish? Will we get the oh-so-trustworthy authorities involved? Are we hoping for an arrest? A conviction? Throwing a queer or poc person in prison so they can be abused and assaulted and humiliated behind bars? Is that who we are?

Callouts and the like don't serve any real good in the world. At a macro scale they divide us when we should be standing together, and at a micro scale they result in deeply traumatic never-ending harassment and threats and doxxing and worse to a person who almost definitely does not deserve it. And again, for what? A sense of "justice?" this is not justice. This is retribution. It is punishment.

even if she doesn't "try to pass" she still deserves the same basic respect you give everybody else.

even if she's done something bad that doesn't excuse you misgendering her on purpose.

i'm so sick of people treating trans people's pronouns as some kind of reward you get if you've been a good tranny.

this goes for those who use neopronouns too i dont care how "weird" you think it is especially if you're trans yourself.

in new zealand, our evil government are trying to legislate definitions of women and men, in ways that are legally incoherent but clearly trying to pave the way for more horrifically transphobic legislation. we have an election in a few months but our main opposition party, and all our mainstream news media, are so spineless and cooked that there's a good chance the ghouls will win reelection.

it took 2 whole months for local terf group 'speak up for women' to get 2,000 signatures on the petition that led to this new bill in our parliament.

it's taken five days for this pro-trans 'they don't speak for us' petition to get 17,000 signatures.

this is a show of support that is really heartening for a lot of trans people in our corner of the world.

cis/ish women, if you're from here but haven't signed yet, please do. and if you're not from here and you know any new zealanders, could you send them this petition? a full fifth of our population lives overseas, and there's a good chance they don't follow the news.

When Grace is still incredibly amnesiac and manages to remember what his apartment looks like, he remarks the lack of feminine touches in the decoration and casually wonders if this means he is single or maybe gay.

Upon learning of the astrophage problem, all the nations of the world get their shit together in record time and give Stratt basically unlimited power, authority and resources to do whatever is necessary to save Earth. This itself is a political choice. Pair it with the vastly different real world response world leaders have to climate change and it becomes a social commentary, sorry Andy but it really does.

The reason Grace decides to join the Hail Mary project is because of his students. He's in the middle of a class when he realizes the incredibly hard and bleak future that awaits his students due to the cooling Sun, and tells Stratt he wants to keep helping.

Shortly after figuring out how astrophage reproduce on his own, Grace is taken to the aircraft carrier, where he meets for the first time the other scientists involved in the project. After explaining his findings, a Chinese scientist announces their team has been able to reproduce Grace's findings, the implied reason being they had somehow spied on them.

During one of his first conversations with Rocky, Grace remarks on an unexpected hurdle of meeting aliens: pronouns. His conclusion is to just shrug and slap he/him pronouns on Rocky. There are no further conversations about this topic, not even when both of them are able to communicate fluently. Grace doesn't re-examinate his pronoun choice any further, nor, despite having a PhD in molecular biology and being curious about things like how Eridians eat, ask about Eridians' concepts of sex and gender.

Following that previous point, when Rocky mentions having a mate back home, Grace chooses for said mate the name Adrian. This is yet another reference to the Rocky movies, albeit a more obscure one, and a lot of the people that didn't realize this simply read both Rocky and Adrian as male and therefore gay.

One last bit re gender and sexuality is the fact that at no point during the book does Ryland Grace, a single man of unspecified sexuality, lament being single or express any sexual desires, which is why many people read him as being on the asexual spectrum.

The movie had to gloss over many things and completely skip over others, some of these later things were the incredible sacrifices and hardships Earth had to go through to survive until hopefully Project Hail Mary managed to find a solution to the astrophage problem. First off, in order to produce the astrophage fuel for the ship they paved a huge chunk of the Sahara desert, which had devastating ecological and climate consequences, altered or destroyed the homes and livelihoods of millions of people and created tons of refugees. Also, in order to win time and counter the effects of the cooling Sun, they start to nuke chunks of fucking Antarctica, because making climate change worse will make Earth hotter and therefore buy them time. The first time the scientist (a self-declared hippie ecologist) in charge of this orders the release of the bombs, he understandably breaks down and starts to cry. Needless to say, nuking the fucking Antarctica raises sea levels and also has horrendous ecological and climatic consequences and once again would in fact create millions of refugees. The fact that the book doesn't dwell on the consequences of any of these two actions doesn't change the fact that we as readers are supposed to extrapolate and put two plus two together whether Andy intended to or not. Expecting otherwise is frankly insulting.

At one point Stratt tells Grace what will happen to Earth while they await for the solution to the astrophage problem. She talks about the famines and how many people will die, but that's just the people that will starve to death. Millions more will die in the wars that will break out all over the planet because there is no way the richer and more powerful nations will be willing to share resources equally with the rest.

Grace gifts Rocky, a member of an alien species, a laptop that contains the sum of all human knowledge, history and media. He knows Rocky, but has never met other Eridians, and despite this he chooses to give it to them.

The fucking foundational plot of the book is interspecies collaboration, trust, and friendship. Choosing to meet and befriend an alien despite all the possible risks and dangers is just as political of a choice as choosing to kill an alien would be.