A thought experiment. If you and some others are in a car, and it's just driven off a cliff, and as you are falling you say to the other occupants, "We've just driven off a cliff! Lets open the door and get out of here!" is that gratuitous negativity? No, it's the truth.
Most people, in this car, don't want to hear the truth. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Stop being so negative! Saying we've driven off a cliff is getting me down! So shutup!
The thing is, reality is not all sunshine and rainbows. There are some very hard realities unfolding in the world right now. Remove the ability to make negative comments and now you can't criticise things. The car driving off the cliff is a metaphor for our society which now openly tortures, wages a never ending false war on terror, and is a government of wolves that's using incrementalism to roll out a police state. We double tap drone strike weddings, we snoop on every communication on the planet. And when it's found out, absolutely nothing changes, because we are already captured. We are already prisoners.
This is not negativity. This is reality. This is the truth. Some people, when faced with this, want to shake people, wake them up and say 'lets fix this'. But most want to bury their head in the sand. They want to gag the words. They want to shoot the messenger. And then go back to sleep in their ivory tower, hoping that they will die of old age before the consequences really come home to roost.
For a group of supposedly smart people, this is incredibly dumb. I've just finished reading Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" to try and get a better understanding of the societal structure of prisons and punishment to better understand the times I live in. And most of what's in that book would be deemed by a lot of people here as 'gratuitous negativity'. And yet Foucault was one of the great minds of our time. Under this guideline his ideas are no longer welcome. And so it goes.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell