"Political" doesn't have to mean 'relating to a political party or election'.
According to Wikipedia, Politics:
> is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals
One of the standard by laws for clubs here is "not bound to political party", i.e we had a few extreme right wing people and many left wing and a great mass of moderate.
GNU GPL is political, every choice you do in computers have a political component. You choose if you allow piracy, black hats, surveillance, alcohol, meat, veganism etc. These are political decisions that will effect the feel of your club, even if you actively do not care about a decision.
The important part is that the club needs to survive and it only does that if you manage to find new people who wants do stuff, and put partisanship aside.
This is obviously false with a tiny bit of consideration.
If your definition of "computing" is narrowly constrained to the abstract mathematical reasoning then sure.
But if we consider a broader scope, then computers, the internet, and how the software we use to interact with them are designed is absolutely a political topic due to how it shapes not just interpersonal interactions, but also the kinds of business models that are possible and, downstream of that, modern society as a whole. Among other issues.
Do you think firearm ownership and usage is free from politics? Do you think a gun club is free from politics?
Of course not.
> Do you think a gun club is free from politics?
That depends. Is it a "let's talk everything about guns"? Is it a "let's go to a shooting range and shoot guns" club? There's a place for people to discuss things, there's a place for people to do things together, and neither might be a good place for people willing to be political in the sense of some people trying to coerce club members into specific beliefs, or trying to make the organization pursue some social cause.
Want to have a social gun club? Find or start one specifically about gun-related social causes! There's space for that too!
Really, all this "political" vs. "not political" boils down to people wanting to "talk shop", discuss technical or practical or emotional aspects of something, without feeling coerced to join causes and judged for not joining them, or otherwise have their standing as a human being questioned by some zealots.
I know of no club where the purpose is merely to talk about guns. Gun clubs are typically organised shooting ranges. In Australia, if you own a firearm, I believe you are legally required to belong to one, and have some kind of minimum attendence per year.
And yes, they discuss politics, and they veer strongly towards conspiricy paranoia.
I expect it's the same in the US, especially with its NRA stranglehold the culture there.
I'm not sure if you're aware of the Port Arthur massacre in the 1990s in Tasmania. Probably small beer if you're from the US with it's weekly atrocities. The PM at the time instituted a mandatory gun buy-back/hand-in/confiscation scheme to reduce the number of firearms in the community, which was broadly seen as a Good Thing (by people who don't own firearms. ie. the majority of the population).
Talk in the gun-club is that the massacre was conspiricy perpetuated by the Gubmint in order to bring in tighter gun control laws, confiscate firearms, etc.
A nuclear warhead is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for various ends, both political and apolitical.
See how silly that sounds? Some tools have sufficient impact that they transform society, and that is inherently political.
So "Democrat ladies who lunch and write patches for Mastodon," and "Trump supporters who drink beer and write surveillance software," or "meditation group (Haskell-only)" would work great, much better than "Your coworkers, but you've never met them before."