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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Fear. Fear! FEAR!! They are fucking terrified of us. We're terrified of each other. We're terrified of darkness, of strangers, of foreigners, of immigrants. We're terrified of the future and past and even the present too. It's on the news all the time, on the TV all the time, on the internet all the time. Governments, militaries, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, celebrities, sports teams, any kind of event you imagine...

Terror is the currency of today.

Fuck, what a mess we are in.

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>Terror is the currency of today.

It seems that it's a big problem in US. People in US are scared as nowhere else (even in the zones of open warfare). Cops are killing harmless people being afraid of them, celebrities are afraid of their fans, moms are afraid of this strange-looking guy standing near their children, common people are afraid of a foreigner even though the statistical probability of him being a terrorist going to kill you is three times lower than that of a lightning bolt unexpectedly doing the same.

The more secure and wealthy our world become, the more scared people get. It's pretty the same with the economy. Out ancestors had no toilets in their homes and faced starvation, yet nowadays people feel deprived of wealth as never before.

John Lennon would like a word with you.

Oh wait, he doesn’t. Because some crazy fan shot him and he’s been dead for decades.

This is nothing new.

I think you missed my point. Pretty sure that John Lennon did not live in fear of being shot in the back his entire life. The fact this happened scared everyone else so bad that they live profoundly different lives full of fear. My point has nothing to do with how rational or irrational that fear is. I'm only pointing its existence, the elephant in the room is our own fear, like a huge Spectre over everything that nobody ever looks at or questions. Fear drives society.

The US was dramatically more dangerous 40 years ago than it is today. The murder rate was 100% higher in 1980 - approximately the peak murder rate in US history - vs the expected 2018 full year figures (which based on numbers so far, will show one of the largest single year reductions in murder ever recorded in the US; Chicago's murders for example should be down about 15% this year). The culture was a wild mess throughout the 1970s, far beyond anything we see today. If John Lennon wasn't afraid of being shot at the time, that says more about his personal attitude on life than it does about the actual murder risks in 1980.

Yes, my point is about the psychology of today versus then. I can remember back to the early 1980s, remember well the 1990s. Today the fear is very, very bad. Which is ironic, considering the very statistics you cited. We're more terrified than ever, even as the real threats are statistically less. Go go gadget brain!

The averages are not that great when talking about specific/special cases. I can't find the details about the 60s, but currently in Chicago ~60% of homicides are gang warfare related. Being a famous person living in a nice area isolates you from that a lot. So whatever city it is, I'm sure celebrities enjoy a much lower chance of street murder than an average person.

It's when they're announced and surrounded by huge crowds, that's a bigger risk.

In Baltimore: "According to the analysis, nearly 90 percent of the 344 [homicide] victims in 2015 had a prior criminal record. Of those, 80.2 percent had a prior drug arrest; 60.8 had been arrested for a violent crime; and half had a prior gun charge. The average victim had been arrested 13 times before..."

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-co...

I agree that celebrities have a smaller chance of random murder, but fans harming celebrities is definitely a quirk of human nature. Beyond the one deaths that make wikipedia, there are plenty of crazies that get caught before being able to act, or the celebrity survives the attack with injuries. X percentage of humans are crazy, and once you have 113.8m instagram followers, that's 1,138 instances of 1 in 100,000 crazy.

And how often are pop stars killed by crazed fans? In the 60 year history of rock you can count them on one hand and not use all five fingers.

Lennon was killed on the street walking into his apartment building not at a concert. Lennon also lived like a regular New Yorker picking up his own dry cleaning and prescriptions from the drug store on 72nd and Columbus, taking the family to the park across the street etc. You couldn't have chosen a worse person.

>"This is nothing new."

No setting up a "command post" as mentioned in the article, facially ID'ing "fans" and introducing police culture to concert venues is indeed very new and very creepy. It's also about the most un-rock and roll thing I've heard of. Any venue larger than a club has security and metal detector as the door. This is just a self-aggrandizing control freak.

Mark David Chapman didn’t have the internet.

This is an example of how extreme naivity can be actually insulting

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