Eh, I don't see it as any worse than any of the other miscellaneous distractions that've cropped up over the year I've been posting here (admittedly I don't know much of what it was like before then). Sometimes they're the top thing for a day or two, but not that big a proportion overall. We had 2 or 3 weeks where for some reason fitness/exercise/weightlifting was a big thing here ("hacking your body"), then there was a flurry of articles on dating and pick-up artists ("hacking dating"), etc. And generic politics/economics threads date back a few years, from what I can tell in the archives (a million rounds of libertarians v. social-democrats).
edit: As just one example, here's a 2007 HN debate on unions, with a mixture of good discussion and political acrimony, and a side thread where people debate whether this kind of debate belongs on HN, or should stay on reddit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20249
People tend to have much stronger opinions/prejudice on politics than on fitness.
It's interesting to read non-hacking discussions in HN when they are from a perceptive (vs. judgmental) standpoint. As it is now, there isn't really much difference between Egypt threads here and in Reddit (yeah, I know we're not supposed to compare. HN isn't Reddit yet, but HN geo-political discussions are)
edit: As just one example, here's a 2007 HN debate on unions, with a mixture of good discussion and political acrimony, and a side thread where people debate whether this kind of debate belongs on HN, or should stay on reddit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20249