It is unfortunate that anyone should see a domain such as politics as a place where discussions are inherantly beyond salvage.

I agree with your assessment, but applying our skills to the political domain is very much an open problem--and a difficult one at that. See these wiki pages: [Mind-killer] and [Color politics] for a concise description of the issue. The gist of it is that politics involves real-world violence, or the governmental monopoly thereof, or something which could involve violence in the ancestral environment and thus misleads our well-honed instincts. Thus, solving political conflicts requires specialized skills, which are not what LessWrong is about.

Nevertheless, there are a number of so-called open politics websites which are more focused on what you're describing here. I'd like to see more collaboration between that community and the LessWrong/debiasing/rationality camp.