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I see your core point here, but I want to quibble with the linguistic specifics. I don't think what you mean by "afraid of crime" and what your interlocutors mean is the same thing. I have encountered people who are annoyingly, performatively "not afraid of crime" in the sense of arguing that it's actually no big deal if cars get broken into. There's zero chance I'm going to back that position and I don't want to be mistaken for it... but I am not afraid of crime. By this, I don't mean that I think the chances of being victimized by crime is zero (I've had my car broken into, for example), but that I don't generally think about being victimized by crime at all on a day-to-day basis. Encountering sketchy individuals will instantly raise the salience of it to the front of my mind, but the modal number of times that I consider whether I'm going to be the victim of a crime in a given week is zero.
Let's flip this to one where I think we're likely to fundamentally agree - are you afraid of Covid? I'm not and I never was. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous from the start that other people similarly situated to myself were "taking it serious" at all. They clearly are afraid of Covid and many of them will say as much. Part of this is clearly about estimations of the severity of the disease, but it's not the whole thing - I just literally do not experience any fear when I contemplate the possibility that I could get a nasty respiratory disease. I will or I won't, but I'm not going to reshape my whole life to avoid something that just isn't all that likely to be an issue.
Another example - are you scared of afraid of dying in an automobile accident? Much like crime, the only time I give it any thought is when something sharply raises the salience of it, like riding a bike near someone that's driving aggressively. Despite the fact that this is probably the thing that's most likely to kill me in a given year at my current age, I don't experience any fear of it. Someone might run a red light, slam into the side of my car, and leave me permanently paralyzed. In fact, someone did run a stop sign and T-bone me, and that one did stick with me a bit longer, but it eventually faded. I just drive down the road, doing normal stuff, completely unafraid of the activity even while I acknowledge that it's the most dangerous part of my life. I actually do want something done as far as policies go (in fact, decreasing QoL for motorists as a tradeoff for walkable neighborhoods is probably my top remaining NormieLib position). But afraid? No, I wouldn't say so.
I don't think this is just a matter of connotation or denotation - I think this really is a difference in the experience or expression of fear.
Well of course I'm not afraid of Covid, in the sense that I'm not worried about catching it and dying from it. But I am worried that one of my elderly loved ones might catch it and die from it. And if I was an elderly or immunocompromised person, I would think it would be perfectly reasonable for that counterfactual version of me to be significantly more afraid of Covid than I personally am.
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