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I’m really surprised that none of the convicted psychics challenged the charges against them on First Amendment grounds. In the early 1980s, a Californian psychic escaped conviction by invoking the First Amendment. Its true that the psychics in this case were indicted on ordinary grand larceny charges but a good defense lawyer should have been able to bring in the First Amendment. The psychics certainly charged enough to hire excellent counsel.Report
In NYC, is that good money?Report
It depends on how you live and where you live.Report
Let us say that the average psychic earns around 900 a week, assuming that they get three hundred a day for three days a week. If they work 50 weeks a year than they get around 45,000 a year. That isn’t great money for New York but plenty of people manage to live in New York City while earning a lot less.Report
Before this falls off the bottom of the page, I’m terribly let down nobody got this as an OT pay-grade post.
Sometimes I’m just too subtle?Report
I fear I missed the subtlety. (Does it have something to do with hedge funds and stock market gurus and baiting people for witchcraft and the “crime” of being a psychic? Sincere question, by the way.)
I admit that I read the nyt article only when you made this comment. This following comment is enough to inspire at least a double take from, say, Jon Row:
That doesn’t seem like the way a parole board should act, I think. They’re dealing with other people’s freedom. And the one seeking parole isn’t even, in this example, claiming that psychic powers are real.
I personally have very mixed feelings about all this, at least in theory. In theory, I believe that it’s important to respect people, even if they believe in things that I don’t. In other words, some people are spiritualists and believe in psychics and whatnot. In practice, I also know that people can be highly suggestible or sometimes duped by others who gain their confidence somehow. (I once almost signed a gym membership that I knew, at the time, I didn’t want and couldn’t afford, simply because the sales reps put a lot of pressure on me.)Report
I am not taking your money for practicing hedgewitch prognostication here; the infamous OT paygrade.Report
ah, okay….I (think) I got it now. Thanks!Report
It means I’m a real witch, @gabriel-conroy
I even have a wart on my face. No hairs growing out of it.Report
Witch as in Wiccan? (If so, that’s cool, by the way. I was never a Wiccan or a “goddess worshipper” (not necessarily the same thing, I know), but I used to be a fellow traveler.)Report
We need to compare your weight with DensityDuck’s.Report
+5 Points to Slytherine!Report
And I totally agree that the punishment doesn’t really seem to fit the crime; but I think of fortune teller as an entertainment; and shafting someone for nearly a million bucks does seem like a crime worthy of something.
The question, really, is what? What’s the path to retribution?Report
Yeah, I don’t know. I do have a very close relative and her wife who’s kind of into that stuff. They probably approach it at least 51% as entertainment, and while they spend some money, it’s certainly only entertainment-level amounts, say, the price of a movie with snacks. But on some level, I think they really believe it or at least think there’s something to it. And frankly (and this might raise hackles from the more rationalistically inclined here), I’m not 100% certain they’re wrong.Report
So long as it’s only entertainment, I do thing there’s something to it:
It makes you consider things from a different perspective as you scan the prediction against your known knowns. It kilters you. This is a very worthwhile thing,for while it promotes silly beliefs, it also promotes some degree of introspection and self-analysis.Report
Not everybody can afford a shrink.
Something something Jung.Report
I live near Wilhelm Reich’s place.Report
The perfect example of a master loving a student too much to tell him he’s wrong.Report
Here’s some Reich, from Listen Little Man, which I read when I was 16 and thought totally offensive in tone, but with some interesting ideas.
He was a strange dude, he used to dissolve clouds out of the sky over Rangeley Lake. So us kids did it, too. We’d stare at them, focus, and they’d dissolve, if you picked your cloud carefully; meaning you picked a cloud that was already evaporating.Report
A couple weeks ago I was leaving my neighborhood and had to stop behind a bus at the nearby railroad tracks. One of the railroad company’s service trucks — the pickups that have drop-down steel wheels that fit the rails — was parked on the tracks a ways past the crossing. Between the service truck and and the crossing there was a guy with what was clearly a pair of wire dowsing rods.Report
One of my favorite signs I’ve ever seen in NYC was on the door to a walkup apartment. It said, “Please ring bell to let psychic know you’re here.”Report
Yeah that’s bad marketing there. It should read something like “Please ring bell to acknowledge that psychic already knows you’re here.”Report