Cooking with Gas
Broadly speaking, the social amplification of risk is comparable to a game of Telephone. It is a process whereby specific, technical, scientific assessments of dangers become sensationally politicised to the point that the "thing" that prompts public outrage is radically different to the "thing" being assessed in the first place.
Last week, the Biden administration was coming to take away your gas stoves. Or, so we would be led to believe from the reporting. Indeed, news organisations can't be held fully to blame for this one, when you have controversial politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandra Occasio-Cortez trying to spin the story to excite their base.
What should have been a rather dry, sober, news story questioning if gas stove manufacturers are ensuring the safety of their products has now become a partisan conflict between liberal electric stove lovers and patriot gas burners.
Sadly, by this point, engaging in a debate of facts and logic is almost completely irrelevant in the public sphere. It is now a battle of public perception over the politics of the whole thing - one which looks more favourably on the position of rightwing pundits of "leave our stoves alone and let us cook in peace, damn it".
Such a narrative is also augmented by an odd discourse on socioeconomic class in America whereby cooking on gas is a dirty and inefficient means of meal preparation forced upon the lower (rural) classes, who should aspire to the cleaner electric cooking of the American (coastal) middle class. In a winter where energy infrastructure is a topic of public debate, the "attack" on gas stoves also raises a significant point - why would the government want to force households into accepting a single point of failure for keeping their homes warm?
In the UK, where gas stoves are largely ubiquitous (and electric stoves are largely relegated to cheaply built low-income households), the gas stove is typically seen as a redundancy system to help people survive if the power goes out for any substantial length of time. With a gas stove, some rooms can still be warned, and meals can be cooked. If, for some reason, there was a disruption to the gas supply, then households can use electric heaters and hotplates or halogen ovens to produce similar outcomes. It would take a catastrophic disruption to both services for households to be placed in a truly dire situation.
The perception that the Biden administration is using reported health risks as a pretence to ban gas stoves is being swiftly reframed as "StoveID-19" in some corners of the internet. It is seen as further evidence of a secret plot of mass murder by making people more vulnerable to the cold, harsh winter (which may or may not be manufactured by HAARP). In other areas of fringe right-wing politics, Biden's anti-gas agenda is a direct result of intervening in the Ukraine-Russia war and/or a symptom of America's increasing energy vulnerability caused by pursuing climate change policies.
Sperm Counts on Deathwatch
News last week of a scientific report suggesting a decline in sperm counts provided right-wing pundits with further evidence, alongside declining levels of testosterone, that Western male virility is collapsing. Such evidence, perhaps, provides some explanation for the rise in mythopoetic characters such as Andrew Tate and Liver King, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson - men who present themselves as being in stalwart defiance of diminishing masculinity.