Another way to achieve a similar effect is to post about electoral politics, sexism, racism, privilege, political correctness, genetic differences in intelligence, and similar "political" issues (by which I mean here issues with such pervasive partisan associations that we expect discussions of them to become subject to the failure modes created by such associations) on our own blogs*, and include links to those discussions on LW where we think they are of general interest to the LW community.
That way, LW members who want to discuss (some or all of) these topics in a way that doesn't spill over into the larger LW forum can do so without bothering anyone else.
* Where "blogs" here means, more broadly, any conversation-hosting forum, including anonymous ones created for the purpose if we want.
My initial idea was a (weekly?) politics open thread, to make it as easy as possible to avoid politics threads / prevent risk of /discussion getting swamped by [politics]-tagged threads, but given the criticisms that have been raised of the karma system already, it's probably best to keep it offsite. There's already a network of rationality blogs; maybe lw-politics could be split off as a group blog? That might make it too difficult for people to start topics, though -- so your idea is probably best. Possibly have a separate lw-politics feed / link aggrega...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.