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Costanza comments on Politics is a fact of life - Less Wrong Discussion
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Science is a fact of life, one which nobody can really afford to ignore. But a steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Or so I've heard.
Matters of policy and governance and economics are important. But typically, "politics" tends to mean "political news" -- election horseraces, poorly-designed opinion polls, and general show business for ugly people. That's why it's the mind-killer.
I would not automatically downvote a serious analysis of policy or governance on this site. Something like an examination of a RAND study.
Sure, valueless political discussions are valueless, and valuable ones aren't. Of course.
The question is whether we {do, should, can} condition our rejection of a discussion on its valuelessness rather than its political character. The implicit suggestion is that rather than treating political discussions as something special, we ought to enforce the general rule of rejecting valueless discussion.
The main difficulty I see is that we don't actually seem to enforce such a general rule.
I'd rather say that the "political character" of a discussion on an open internet forum like this -- one not devoted to politics -- tends to be a very good predictor that the discussion will be valueless, or worse. I'm sure there would be exceptions, but I don't know that this is shows much of an error in the existing karma system.