I noticed something interesting reading the comments on this thread. I consider myself to be someone who's politically non-ideological (that is to say, I don't identify with any particular political affiliation), and when I wrote my post, I was feeling playful... I didn't have any strong feelings about what I was writing about. Similar to how one might feel if one was trying to figure out the best strategy for beating a video game. However, reading the comments to this post, I find myself getting annoyed with the commenters for the political bias I perceive in them. The emotion I feel is similar to how I felt talking about politics during an earlier period of my life when I would classify myself as politically ideological. Therefore, I propose that the politics "mindkiller" functions as something of a memetic virus, in the sense that if someone starts to converse in a partisan way, others are likely to respond in kind. The quote in this post constitutes further evidence for this position.
Takeaway: Think really carefully before discussing something in a partisan way, especially if it's never been discussed in a partisan way before.
I consider myself to be someone who's politically non-ideological,
I think the problem is that being "politically non-ideological" is a meaningless phrase. Rather, if someone describes himself as "non-ideological" that generally means he's bought into his ideology so strongly that he no longer perceives it as an ideology.
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: