Case in point:NASA.

NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This is their mission statement from the NASA website – “NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery.”

Nasa is spending its resources on making pretty pictures representing questionable ideological movements.

Compare and contrast with the Chinese and European space agencies:

“A European experiment aboard China’s Chang’e 6 mission has recorded previously undetected charged particles on the moon’s surface, a catalog of which enables astronomers to better probe the chemical makeup of the moon’s regolith.

These particles, which are essentially gases excited by sunlight, were detected at the landing spot of the Chang’e-6 spacecraft in the southern pocket of the Apollo crater, which lies within the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon’s far side. The ion detector was the first European Space Agency instrument to land on the moon.”

If given a choice between a space sciences body that does ideological posturing and one that does; well… Space Science I know which one I would choose with regards to advancing our knowledge of the cosmos.  So let’s work backwards and use the keen example of Toaster-Fucking to illustrate why NASA is spending its time and resources on questionable virtue signals that have exactly zero to do with its stated mandate – conducting space science.

I give full credit to Devon Eriksen on “X” for the TF explanation.

“Some of you may be wondering why the entire bureaucratic caste of the USA is completely obsessed with weird sex stuff.

   Sure, we can all have good fun ranting about how insane this cult is, and watching them melt down when we leave skid marks on their sacred icons, but sooner or later, you gotta ask… why.

   It’s the toaster-fucker problem. Some of you may be familiar. Goes like this, and I quote:

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.

I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends “I want to fuck a toaster” Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.

    Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds “Toaster Fucker Support group” where he reads that he’s actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.

     Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.

     But the toaster fucker problem doesn’t stop there.

    Because every social group has an axis of prestige. They have to compete with each other for status somehow. That’s what humans do.

   And in the toaster-fucking group, the axis of prestige aligns with fucking toasters.

   So first they compete to see who can fuck the most toasters.

   Then, when that is saturated, they one up each other by being most open with the general public about their toaster fucking ways.

  Then they make toaster-fucker pride t-shirts and hats and bumper stickers.

   Then they move on to bragging about how they sneak into other people’s kitchens and fuck their toasters, too, and swap tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking.

    But it doesn’t stop there, either.

    Pretty soon normal people, who ten years before would shrugged and said “that’s weird”, are now sick of toaster-fucker flags everywhere and their kids being told to fuck toasters by sickos, and now they’re going to burn every toaster-fucker flag they see, and Florida just passed a law requiring you to be 21 years old with proof of ID to buy a toaster. And Utah has banned toasters altogether and the Mormons have stopped even eating toast, bagels, waffles, or any other heated bread product.

   But it doesn’t stop there, either.

   Because a few toaster-fuckers get beaten with fence posts by people sick of hearing about toaster-fucking, and other people, who didn’t see or hear the toaster-fuckers’ prior behavior, say “holy shit, toaster fuckers really are oppressed”. And they decide to become “toaster-fucker allies”, despite the fact that they haven’t the slightest real interest in fucking any toasters themselves.

    But it doesn’t stop there.

    Because toaster-fucking has become a sacred cause, it must now must compete with other sacred causes for the minds of highly programmable non-player characters, and there are clashes in the streets between the Toaster Fucker Pride March and the Stop Raccoon Shaving protests.

   This is what “go outside and touch grass” really means. It doesn’t mean that plants magically cure insanity, it means go encounter randomly selected people who have nothing to do with you other than geographic proximity.

   The purpose of this is to remember what normal people are like, and what normalcy is.

   It’s not that normal people don’t do weird things. Maybe they like their pancakes with ketchup. Maybe they consider midgets to be the height of sex appeal. Maybe they never wash their socks, but just throw them away and buy more instead.

What makes normal people normal is that they keep that shit to themselves when it isn’t relevant.

  Like when you’re an institute for space exploration.

  Not toaster fucking.

  Space exploration.

  Remember?

Our institutions need a serious wake up call to help them “remember” what they are supposed to be about.