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:
I'm not saying that I think Overcoming Bias should be apolitical, or even that we should adopt Wikipedia's ideal of the Neutral Point of View. But try to resist getting in those good, solid digs if you can possibly avoid it. If your topic legitimately relates to attempts to ban evolution in school curricula, then go ahead and talk about it - but don't blame it explicitly on the whole Republican Party; some of your readers may be Republicans, and they may feel that the problem is a few rogues, not the entire party. As with Wikipedia's NPOV, it doesn't matter whether (you think) the Republican Party really is at fault. It's just better for the spiritual growth of the community to discuss the issue without invoking color politics.
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).
I had been thinking about making the same suggestion. Some pros of a politics thread include:
Having a place to take the long subthreads on politically-charged topics that sometimes inevitably arise by topic drift on other posts, making LW a more pleasant experience for politics-allergic readers.
A place to test whether our rationalist skills are up to the task of discussing mind-killing topics in a non-mind-killing way.
Some would enjoy the possibility of discussing political topics in a "rational" atmosphere (truth-searching, not us-vs-them, aware of biases and fallibility, etc.) that other politics forums do not have.
Cons:
Mind-killing of a certain degree might (some may say, would) nevertheless occur. This is not so tragic if the thread remains a self-contained experiment and the rest of LW proceeds as usual. The danger is that there might be spillover. If you were in a heated argument in the politics thread, and then see an unrelated post on AI or game theory by your rival, would you be able to avoid the halo effect and not judge it negatively as the post of a commie/libertardian/racist/PC thought cop/whatever? Even worse, if the arguments in the politics thread happened to usually have the same participants taking the same sides in opposite political clusters, we would be in danger of a Robber's Cave situation.
Some might be concerned that having extreme/contrarian political views openly expressed may bring bad reputation to LW, but without these views represented the discussion would be bland and uninteresting. Personally I don't see why things would be necessarily worse with a politics thread than with already existing threads like this one. One could even argue that it would be good for appearances to have all the "extremism" concentrated in one or a few politics thread/s, and not scattered all over the site.
I think the experiment is worth trying, with rules like Tim's clearly stated in the post, and ruthlessly enforced by downvoting offenders even if they share your "side".