Data point: during the Melbourne LessWrong meetups, discussion of politics proved (a large fraction would say significant) net negative.
For what it's worth, I read Politics is the Mind-Killer as almost the opposite of your interpretation: that politics is a mind-killer, so why would you want to drag that awful mess into examples that could otherwise be clean. ie, avoid politics at significant cost, and this includes in otherwise sterile examples.
To some extent I wonder why we'd need to avoid politically-charged examples if we were capable of actually talking about politics; I feel like if that was the case it would be Politics is the Comment-Thread-Exploder, and we'd only avoid it because a throwaway example would case a huge, well-reasoned, rational but off-topic discussion.
shouldn't that be the make-comment-threads-explode-er?
Summary: I propose we somewhat relax our stance on political speech on Less Wrong.
Related: The mind-killer, Mind-killer
A recent series of posts by a well-meaning troll (example) has caused me to re-examine our "no-politics" norm. I believe there has been some unintentional creep from the original intent of Politics is the Mind-Killer. In that article, Eliezer is arguing that discussions here (actually on Overcoming Bias) should not use examples from politics in discussions that are not about politics, since they distract from the lesson. Note the final paragraph:
So, the original intent was not to ban political speech altogether, but to encourage us to come up with less-charged examples where possible. If the subject you're really talking about is politics, and it relates directly to rationality, then you should be able to post about it without getting downvotes strictly because "politics is the mind-killer".
It could be that this drift is less of a community norm than I perceive, and there are just a few folks (myself included) that have taken the original message too far. If so, consider this a message just to those folks such as myself.
Of course, politics would still be off-topic in the comment threads of most posts. There should probably be a special open thread (or another forum) to which drive-by political activists can be directed, instead of simply saying "We don't talk about politics here".
David_Gerard makes a similar point here (though FWIW, I came up with this title independently).