@reedlindwurm
It may not make *sense* that people are saying "you are not allowed to be upset", but that's absolutely happening. People call it "doomerism" and ban it. People brag about how fun protests supposedly are. It just makes me angrier every time I hear it.

The words of people saying negative feelings are valid instead ring hollow, either because they're not offering a productive outlet or at least a *hug*, or because they're adding the caveat "but shut up about it".

@reedlindwurm
Heck, I heard *another* version of it just yesterday: "Resist with fierce joy."

@pteryx I get that it's a message that obviously doesn't resonate with you, though I would disagree with the idea that it's trying to "enforce" positivity.

I personally don't agree with it on a broad level either, but I might find it useful depending on the context. Like it makes sense if the point is to make someone feel like they're not just fighting against something (a common complaint) but fighting for something worth fighting for. Or perhaps even to encourage someone to not get so overwhelmed by anger that they do something inadvisable.

But broadly speaking, I'd say outrage and anger are the dominant (and most natural) emotions, along with sadness. Some people probably want a pick-me-up in a circumstance like this, one that feels tragic and hopeless, and for some, it can be a message like that.

@pteryx As for myself, I'm hopping mad at the Trump administration and their enablers, for almost uncountably many reasons. Just that I have no particularly useful direct ways of doing anything about it, so for now I just try to keep myself sane and keep doing something to move forward with my life. Not necessarily what everyone should do, but that's because everyone's circumstances are different.

@reedlindwurm
It doesn't help knowing that decades from now, everyone who was just "keeping themselves sane" to the exclusion of anything that makes it into a history book will be smeared as a fascist. Just like how only a handful of individual non-Jewish Germans during WWII get to evade the label of "Nazi".

So not knowing how to fight back in ways that don't demand that one be super-social, feel exactly how others want you to feel, and that *works* makes me feel I'm going to live in shame.

@reedlindwurm
And yes, I *do* think this is about controlling emotions and/or expression of said emotions. Setting aside just how common a demand that is in our society in the first place, to the point that I get the sense that you aren't even considered an adult unless you've done some unholy necromantic ritual to kill all your emotions... that "resist with fierce joy" quote I mentioned was followed up by something like, "At a minimum, it'll piss them off."

Feel *this way* to fight the enemy.

@pteryx Is it *a* way to fight the enemy? Yes, especially when the enemy wants people to cower in fear and conform to their ideology, or else.

Is it about controlling one's own emotions? Yes. Is it about controlling others' emotions? No, not more than any other casual suggestion to "put on a smile" or "you should totally be mad".

Re: "at a minimum, it'll piss them off": That statement itself implies an understanding that effectiveness will vary. It's neither a one-size-fits-all guide nor an absolute command. It's just a suggestion on how to resist oppression in one's social situation. I get that it feels wrong for you in your situation, but I don't think it's fair to accuse others of wanting to force you to conform to it.

I don't know how to judge the ethics of my, your, or anyone else's actions and the legacy we'd leave in history, but I certainly don't think we should be judging ourselves by a hypothetical person in the future who lazily judges the literal millions of people in a given country at a given time with broad and uncharitable strokes. That just seems unnecessarily depressing. And frankly, the notion that everyone in a country who doesn't openly oppose a given government should be counted as endorsing it, is stupid and inaccurate. There are many people who don't necessarily have the capacity to do something.

I get that you don't know how to fight back, and frankly speaking, I don't know either, and I don't think anyone really knows. People are just trying various ideas. So it doesn't make sense to think that anyone's trying to saying "thou must fight back this way and only this way". If all you're hearing is statements like "resist with fierce joy", then you're definitely not hearing all the chatter in the background debating anxiously whether peaceful methods have failed and what that may mean going forward.

The suggestions from others regarding how to oppose oppression are just that -- suggestions. Not everyone can do them, and it's okay. I, too, would like to do more but I can't. But -- and here's *my* suggestion -- I don't think it's worth feeling shameful about.

And to be fair, I don't think too hard about the ethics of it because I know I don't have answers. I could make myself feel worse and worse by overthinking them, but it'd just annoy me while not helping me get anything done in any way. There's still things I want to get done with this life, and getting those things done doesn't equate to complicity in the horrors around me.

@reedlindwurm
I'll note that "put on a smile", "it's not worth feeling shameful about", and even just "calm down" grate on me as implications of choice of emotion too. ("You should totally be mad" seems to come more from a place of support most of the time, though, rare permission to actually *be* mad.) And it's not *just* saying how people should feel, but blocking or banning people who express feeling otherwise, hence my feeling it's about control.

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@reedlindwurm
If it were only targeted at me, instead of this happening to other people who are upset (indeed, today I watched someone get blocked from a news aggregator for "doomerism" for daring to talk about much harder problems to solve that they don't know how to resist yet believe shouldn't be ignored, *and* pointing out that protest has been defanged by decorum), I wouldn't necessarily think this is a wider problem of trying to make others conform to "correct" resistance.

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@reedlindwurm
Another thing that makes me feel like this is about conformity and control: not hearing enough in terms of alternative paths. I hear *lip service* to the concept of diversity of tactics, yet somehow that rarely seems to translate to hearing about multiple different approaches one could take to resistance; I'm more often hearing "don't give them an excuse!". Again, just because a behavior doesn't make sense doesn't mean it isn't happening (and pissing me off).

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