Can a Tarot card reading be defamatory?

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There is a famous precedent for a divination tool becoming a major piece of philosophy through being commented. It’s the I Ching. If you read it, you will see that the predictions it makes are always very vague. The value is in the large body of interpretations which extract from the text and its symbolism some always applicable precepts.

The problem starts when your job depends on some crazy voodoo your current HR representative believes in and you have to fit your world view into it and sell it believable. Something which is happening and Zodiac Sign incomparability is the least of those problems.

I had a big shot from the US in my former company who got the idea of forcing us into one of those "you're going to be a colour afterwards"-tests. Luckily I worked in Germany and after the initial handing out of information, the whole thing became something between a running gag and "don't even try to force me into this, I'll mess you up over privacy laws". He gave up.

If they are paying for a tarot reading, that means they believe there is a supernatural method of getting a factual answer. They do not believe you are just telling them your own personal intuition. You need to understand this if you're going to be taking people's money and not just playing a game with friends.

> Any reading that offers advice is opinion

Your customers will not understand this unless you explicitly state it.

Because I can sort of understand the latter, but how would you even justify the former here on HN, a forum for tech and science oriented people?

Another example is energy manipulation. This is also a map. It's not meant to represent energy in the sense of physics.

It's weird that people who seem otherwise so smart aren't able to conceptualize such abstractions or see how they can be useful.

The map is not the territory.

This works, as we repeat patterns in our life, like getting romantically involved with partners who have same kind of traumas. We must know these patterns subconsciously, otherwise we could not repeat them.

The reading then can, at best, bring into consciousness these subconscious patterns. When we become conscious about them, we can stop repeating them.

So if Tarot reading is succesful, actually the ”reading” becomes false althought it would otherwise have been true.

The post touches on this:

In determining whether the audience is likely to interpret a statement as one of fact or one of opinion or hyperbole, courts consider a viewpoint of an audience familiar with the speaker, the forum, and the circumstances.

The interesting thing here --- and this is useful for HN, which sometimes has very weird ideas of what constitutes defamation --- is that opinions can't be defamatory. You need to be able to trace a defamation claim back to a damaging revelation of a false fact. Here, the root of the damaging claim is a Tarot reading, which is what makes this case spicy.

There is no general overarching rule that applies a reasonable person standard to all areas of law.

That [this person/these people] reasonably understood that the statement(s) [was/were] about [name of plaintiff]

And

“If [a] defamatory meaning would appear only to readers who might be able to recognize it through some knowledge of specific facts and/or circumstances, not discernible from the face of the publication, and which are not matters of common knowledge rationally attributable to all reasonable persons, then the libel cannot be libel per se but will be libel per quod.” (Palm Springs Tennis Club, supra, 73 Cal.App.4th at p. 5, internal citation omitted.)

Are you referring to whether a reasonable listener would believe the defamatory claims? Or whether the person doing the defaming could reasonably be expected to know better than to believe what they're saying?

Normally, we think of situations where the defamer is a crazy person and no reasonable listener would believe them. But the distinction seems pertinent to the potential prosecution against Trump based on the Jan 6th committee hearings, because in that case the normal "reasonable person" standard would be inverted. A reasonable listener could easily believe that the President of the United States was describing reality when he claimed he knew the election was stolen and that the Vice President could legally overturn the results. His defense may well rest on whether he himself could have reasonably believed that what he was saying was true.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice, the Japan Sumo Association won a major defamation suit against a tabloid claiming matches were being rigged, despite there being incontrovertible proof that matches were being rigged and the Sumo Association itself expelling a dozen wrestlers for their part in the scheme.

And even non-verbal acts can be defamation. For example showing middle finger to somebody can be defamation and I have heard that using gardening hose to make other person wet could also be defamation.

There is also one other crime in the Finnish law that can make it crime to tell true facts called "yksityiselämää loukkaava tiedon levittäminen" (which means basically spreading information in a way that it violates persons privacy). For example writing in a newspaper that "a woman was molested by her father and now has HIV" could lead to a conviction even if all the facts are true, if that woman has not wanted to make this information public and if readers are able to recognize who this woman is.

Is it actually DEFAMATION then, not something akin to "false light"[1]? (I can't define such a term, since I lack both character and fitness, and thus lack a JD, and thus can't understand why some people seem to have different standards of behavior than others in this cursed commonwealth[2])

[1] https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/pennsylvania-false-light

[2] I'm not your friend, but I am in Pennsylvania today.

For example, saying that someone is involved in a crime it a way that make people think he is guilty when he is, in fact, the victim. For example, "Mr.X is involved in a series of robberies" when he has been robbed.

Other cases where defamation can be invoked is with illegally obtained, private information. For example "Mr.X has been diagnosed with $medical_condition, so...", a clear violation of medical privacy, especially if the one making the accusation is a doctor.

But besides that... many people on HN are employed at social media companies, including tiktok. It does not surprise me at all.

> Regarding symbology, for both intuitive and mechanistic readings, isn't there a lot that can be interpreted - in many different ways - from even a single symbol, let alone a string of symbols?

Well in a mechanistic reading, I would expect the readings to mostly coincide, as long as the readers were using the same decks. Different decks have different symbology, and those readings can have very different results.... But again, for the same decks, would expect a similar reading.

It's the intuitive readings that will throw a major curve ball. In those readings (I do both, btw) I will receive mental pictures, smells, sensations, and more of a reading I do for others. The card symbolism starts me to see those hidden senses (occult as occluded from sight). This tiktoker may have gotten her image intuitively... But how would you know it wasn't a student in her class, or someone was targeting her for being in gender studies, or she pulled it from someone else who happened to be thinking about this prof? And many times, an intuitive reading won't make sense until something else happens. That's happened to me a few times, with a eureka moment days or weeks later.

And with intuitive readings, I have gotten pictures of people, smells of perfume and cologne, maps of areas, and other hidden things. I approach them as 'features of interest'.. certainly not as some presumption of guilt!

I'm certainly not expecting anyone else to believe me. And I have no way to prove it, other than anecdotes by me and those whom I've done readings before. This is just my anecdote of someone who's been in the occult for 15+ years, and seen more than my fair share of craziness.

But this whole debacle of a TikTok reader making public accusations is just sickening.... And falls in line with the types that call themselves "baby witches". For example, it is considered gross form to do 3rd party readings, which this was. It's also in terrible form to make accusations, even if 100% legal and no civil action.

Frankly, I sincerely hope this tiktoker loses their shirt in the lawsuit. It is abhorrent and unconscionable to do what they did. And I hope the prof is able to restore and maintain their status as a professional they are.

Of course the intuitive reading version is slightly more like what you described. But still, there's a difference.

Disclaimer: I've only done tarot once in my entire life. My main interest in this regard are theorizing, *if* occult practices have any truth in them, how would they possibly work.

What makes you say that? I have admittedly only watched one or two of her videos, but I didn't see anything that clearly points to her being mentally ill as opposed to stupid and mean.

Countries that extend defamation to opinions tend to apply a reasonable person or similar standard to the opinions.

We built boardwalks / pavements and industries sprang up collecting street dung and moving it to the fields and gun factories.

The algorithms run by Facebook et al are I suppose "boardwalks" in some sense as you don't need to steer off them unless you want (and there are definite left and right boardwalks available ! :-). Also worth noting that eventually governments took over doing boardwalk like things.

I wonder what other industries we shall see / can already see trying to deal with an already over stretched analogy