Outrage Bonding

I have a personal rule that I tell people when they start bringing this energy into my life: “I’m happy to listen to you for 5 minutes a day on this topic. After that I’m out.”

Well this is relevant to my life. -_- I'm torn between feeling validated that someone else is bothered by this behavior, and annoyed that I didn't post something like this myself.

You even chose almost the same term for it. Mine is "hate bonding", as in "let's hate Team Bad together!", or "Two Minutes Hate" (...which has lasted eight years). It's infected a large enough fraction of my loved ones to be seriously depressing. I spend a lot of time listening to people I love ranting about how other people I love are stupid and terrible.

(Or did. I considered distancing myself from all noticeable partisans, but chose not to because that covered most of the people I'm close to. Instead I blocked the channels where these conversations took place and stopped responding to mail in this category. ...which, at least in the medium term, nearly amounted to the same thing. The last decade has been pretty lonely.)

You note that bringing up the negative consequences is frowned upon, but in my experience it doesn't even take that much. Declining to bond in this way, even implicitly, often makes people angry in and of itself.

My realtime coping mechanism is closest to your "zoning out." I read somewhere that people get uncomfortable quickly if they're talking and not getting verbal acks ("uh huh, sure, yep, okay"), so I just suppress those until they peter out. Works one on one, not so well in a crowd.

Is there a way to do this that stays alert and active, but avoids outrage?

If American citizens who can vote from Trump are arguing over whether hr's a bad guy, there is arguably a point to it .. though I can also the case against.

But Swedish guys ... who arent even allowed to vote for Trump if they want to .. aruing over Trump? What are you doing?

(Presumably, if there is any point at all, the argument is not  against Trump specifically but the global phenomenon he is part of, and whoever the Swedish Trump equivalent is).

The 'live under a rock' strategy has been quite effective for me. I stopped following most political commentary sources several years ago and I've never regretted it.

I avoid political conversations among my family and coworkers because the overwhelming majority are strongly religious and conservative. With beliefs so different from mine discussion is not likely to be productive nor pleasant.

It's not exactly the same thing, but I've been known to try to explain my lack of outrage/engagement/joiner-ism when it comes to things like this, by saying: "I get why you disagree/why that's awful/whatever, but really, I just can't get that worked up just because somebody's wrong on the internet."

It's a little disingenuous, because the issue isn't really "someone being wrong on the internet", but rather that folks feel that there's something wrong in the world, as reflected by a third-party's opinion.  But since we all get our news and opinions delivered by internet these days, this has often (but far from always) worked to shift the topic for me.  

To be fair, sometimes it shifts the topic to a meta-discussion about whether "the internet" (or specific media/social media apps) are "the problem", but even that I find to be a more interesting (and less unhealthy) discussion than dancing around the picked-over carcass of some absent opponent's opinion.

The snarkier response might be: "You disagree with someone on the internet?  You should blog about it!"  But that just piles on the negativity.

Obviously, YMMV.