> This seems like a fallacy. X may be undesirable, but it's impossible to completely rid ourselves of X. Therefore it's pointless to even worry about reducing X.
No one said anything about it being pointless.
And, no one said undesirable. Politics isn’t good or bad. It’s just part of life. In the sense that people are inherently social and will always be discussing, civilly or not, how things should be done.
To me, if I live in a democracy, what would be undesirable is a citizen who is not, in some form or fashion, active in the body politic since a democracy depends on an active (and educated) citizenry in order to function! :).
The NRA is "more political" in the sense of their daily activities, of course, but I think you could construct a great argument that the IETF has more impact on world politics (or, let's say, the governments of the world) than the NRA. Everyone knows the NRA is taking an absolutist give-everyone-an-AR-15 stance; they work very hard on it, but at this point they're almost an anchor. Some parts of the US give easy access to guns, and they're going to do so regardless. Other parts (NYC, where I live) make it very hard to access guns, and the NRA isn't able to do much more. And the rest of the world doesn't care. Meanwhile, the IETF, in how it chooses to distribute power to network operators vs. service providers vs. end users, which protocols it facilitates standardization work on, who is in the room, what sorts of threats cryptographic protocols protect against, etc., has a lot of influence on who has power over digital communications.
I think I'd even argue that it's more important for someone at the IETF to be aware of the political implications of their work than someone at the NRA. The NRA has an obviously political mission; whether you choose to pay attention to it in how you do your job and what you prioritize or not, you're going to further that mission. (Imagine, for instance, being a gun-control advocate at the NRA and see how much impact you'll have.) The IETF's mission is more open-ended, which means you can develop protocols to facilitate government surveillance or to subvert it, depending on what you think is more important.
This seems like a fallacy. X may be undesirable, but it's impossible to completely rid ourselves of X. Therefore it's pointless to even worry about reducing X. Thermodynamics tells us that we can't ever reach absolute zero. Therefore I don't have to put the groceries away in the refrigerator.
No person or organization can be completely apolitical, but they can aim to be minimally political. And that difference is substantial. Only a maximal postmodernist would dispute that the NRA is orders of magnitude more political than the IETF.
Similarly we strive for our courts to be free of bias. However jurists are flesh and blood. They'll get hungry or sleep and that will affect their mood. Yet we'd all be horrified if a judge openly declared "Ya know what? I hate Dutch-Americans and plan to rule against them in every case regardless of the facts"