Well, that's a danger, certainly. But it's not our fated doom. As somebody once said, politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality. So, we ought to be aware of the danger of making public policy into a team sport. However, rationalists don't have to ignore and avoid politics, but rather must try to look at it objectively. There are tools for this. Explicit models checked against historical data is a good start, as a way of making assumptions transparent.
In any case, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. Politicians are the people who tell police and armies what to do. Governments can be benign or maybe not so benign. To ignore politics altogether would not be rational.
to paraphrase Trotsky
Or rather, it seems, to quote J.B. Priestley. See Michael Pollak's comment on this blog post.
Referring, of course, to the proposed U.S. legislation which could cause severe damage to the Internet—at least, that's what a lot of people are saying. See, e.g., this Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress (the first signatory listed is Vint Cerf). On Wikipedia, people including Jimbo Wales are discussing strategies as extreme as blanking the entire site (except for an explanatory message) to get people's attention, and thereby perhaps incite them to action, such as calling their Congressional representative.
I just happened to find out about all this a few hours ago, being someone who tries to avoid distractions like most kinds of news, so possibly others here with similar habits will appreciate having it called to ther attention. Or possibly they won't. But to those of you who possess relevant kinds of expertise:
(I think this subject can be discussed without political advocacy, in which I am mostly not at all interested anyway. It just looks like a practical problem to me.)
Edited to Add: I forgot to include a fourth bullet point:
It seems to have been assumed by many commenters, nevertheless.