Well, there is the aesthetic appreciation of polemic for its own sake, but that's not going to make you more rational.
I think the most obvious answer, though, is that it can inure you a bit to connotative sneers. Aversion to this kind of insult is likely one of the major things keeping you from absorbing novel information!
One way to do this very quickly - you shouldn't, of course, select your politics for such trivial advantages, but if you do, take advantage of it - is to become evil yourself, relative to the majority's values. There are certain groups an attack upon which constitutes an applause line in the mainstream. If you identify as a communist or fascist or Islamist or other Designated Antagonist Group, you can either take the (obviously epistemically disastrous) route of only reading your comrades, or you can keep relying on mainstream institutional sources of information that insult you, and thereby thicken your skin. (Empirical prediction: hard {left|right}ists are more likely to read mainstream {conservatives|liberals} than are mainstream {liberals|conservatives}.)
(An alternate strategy this suggests, if your beliefs are, alas, pedestrian, is to "identify" with some completely ridiculous normative outlook, like negative utilitarianism or something. Let everyone's viewpoint offend you until "this viewpoint offends!" no longer functions as a curiosity stopper.)
Well, I understand your reasoning: you suggest that it's likely (or at least possible) that one's reaction in the face of rhetorically "hot" disagreement will be a built-up tolerance (immunity) for mockery, making one more able to extract substance and ignore affect. My belief is that that particular strength of character (which I admire when I see it, which is rarely) is infrequent relative to, as I keep calling it, a retreat into tribalism in the face of mockery of one's dearly-held beliefs. Hence my feeling that the upper-left quadrant of the...
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