Being nice for free is a bad idea

I think I've managed to cultivate a online personality that makes it clear that I'm not nice to everyone who comes across my way. I'll be kind to strangers — without a doubt; but not everyone deserves the expending of energy that comes with being nice. Depending on who you are, I either have good things or bad things to say about you — which is how humans with some level of social interactivity and opinion forming tend to be. Just ask someone into sports or music — they have a minefield of opinions (some factually sounding but opinions nonetheless). I'm writing this mainly to expand on something in my Atmosphere account's bio, that "I'm not your friend and I read more than you". The second half of that is my cheeky statement as a former New Yorker armed with a library card. But that first half is a reminder (to myself) that not everyone deserves constant good will or benefit of the doubt. Folks like Kissinger definitely would have gleefully eradicated Haiti (if not turned into a plantation-as-country) and folks who hold offsets of his ideals do not need to be given any sort of grace.

This is something I'm going to link when folks decide to label me as a "bad faith actor" or someone that they expect/demand constant good-will from. I am not your emotional or social mule. I will not acquiesce to your need to have someone validate that you are a good person — my bar is higher than most, I think! Especially if you're of the genre of folks who are routinely benefiting from systems that exist and choke the rest of the world. I've refused to choose the "high road" a lot when it comes to the space I work in - I am not cognitively capable of doing this thing where folks ignore or overlook the malice of people for personal gain or for security. Especially in the tech industry, one can find options - you do not have to comply to bullshit in advance (in fact, compliance enables the bullshit to fester longer, look at GitHub and Microsoft).

Anyway, point of this story is that niceness is expensive the further way from a white person one presents as (cishetereonormativity be damned - constant niceness is an extension of whiteness but that's a later post) and kindness is a currency of being in community, but not everyone IS meant to be part of it.