(I had a longish comment here defending the politics taboo, then decided to remove it, because I've found that in the past the responses to defenses of the politics taboo, and the responses to those responses, have done too much damage to justify making such defenses. Please, though, don't interpret my silence from now on as assent to what looks to me like the continuing erosion or maybe insufficiently rapid strengthening of site quality norms.)

Civility and topicality of a discussion isn't a measure of how mind-killed that discussion is. I personally very much doubt that I could have discussed Krugman rationally, had I entered the discussion, though I certainly would have been polite about it.

This has no consequence on whether politics is genuinely a mind-killer. I include this disclaimer because it has just occurred to me that (ironically) perhaps the "politics is a mind-killer" issue might be becoming LW's first really political issue, and prompt all the standard arguments-as-soldiers failures of rationality.

I really did mean "how much of a mind-killer". We can handle mentions of politics better than some think, but (for example) voting vs. not voting + which candidate is the better/less worse choice would be a lot harder.