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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Posting messages and making up that a friend's wife committed suicide is not really "stalking" or "persistently and obsessively harassing". Immoral and possibly illegal? Perhaps. But that's not the same thing.

Also, Duffy was ripped off by Kasamba.

I think the crux of the matter is: even if you did something wrong, do things like that really need to be preserved on the internet under your real name for the rest of your life? Probably not. And do we really want Google to be suggesting this content years after this minor spat, guaranteeing that people will find it?

"Right to be forgotten" is really about this kind of stuff IMHO: okay, you've had your five minutes of shame and that's all fine, and now lets all move on instead of keeping this prominent for years or even decades.

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> Also, Duffy was ripped off by Kasamba.

Can you really be ripped off by psychics? It's not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven't been answered, so I'm not sure of religion or spiritualism can be a "rip-off".

If someone tells you they'll talk to your dead ancestors for money and you don't believe them, who's to say who's speaking the truth? The best you can do is use reasoning like "there's no scientific basis for an afterlife" but that's not a great defence if you're honestly trying to speak to the dead.

I agree with your other points, of course. I'm just amused at the idea of suing psychics for not telling the truth.

"Ripped off" in the colloquial sense, not in the strict legal sense.

Most psychics don't actually believe what they're selling, whereas most priests do.

Prayer also works very different: a psychic will tell you "higher powers told me this man is a {good,bad} match for you", whereas a priest will tell you to "pray and ask God for guidance" and/or offer you some general advice, but they won't say "God told me to relay that [..]".

Should they be sued for it? Probably not. But I do think most psychic "customers" get ripped off by people who are essentially little more than confidence tricksters, but I don't think most people who go to church get ripped off (outside of the "send me your money and go to heaven" kind of twattery).

> Can you really be ripped off by psychics? It's not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven't been answered, so I'm not sure of religion or spiritualism can be a "rip-off".

Well, I would suggest that both are a "rip off" in the sense that they offer claims without evidence.

But a distinction that I see between religious services and psychics is that religious services are not offering financial transactions in direct exchange for services. They ask for donations, and they may make claims such as "God answers all prayers", but you are typically not offering a religious leader money in exchange for some sort of quid pro quo like having a prayer answered.

A lot of "psychics" offer their "services" as "entertainment" in order to avoid claims of fraud. But the fact remains that a lot of people still believe.

My wife and I are performing magicians, and we make it clear that what we do are parlour tricks. And yet I've performed "mind reading" tricks for people in the past who were absolutely convinced that what I did was not a trick even though I presented everything as "magic tricks." It's fucking insane and deeply uncomfortable. I totally get why Penn & Teller stay away from mentalism entirely. And I think this is your point: if someone is determined to accept a faith based belief system, can they really be "ripped off" when reality doesn't deliver their fantasy.

In my opinion, it depends what you offering and the audience / demographic that you are targeting. Magic tricks for entertainment presented as tricks is one thing. A "psychic" (even one that offers a "disclaimer" that it is entertainment) who knows full well they are catering to people that want to believe it is "real" know what they are doing. It gets particularly heinous when these con artists prey on grieving people who just lost a loved one. It's hard not to view a con artist presenting bullshit to a mother who just lost her 12 year-old daughter in a car accident as not ripping them off.

> But the fact remains that a lot of people still believe.

But also, a lot of people still believe in professional wrestling. Are pro wrestlers ripping people off?

Were pro wrestlers ripping people off worse in the '80s and earlier, when they tried really hard to maintain kayfabe, including denying the existence of kayfabe?

If you pay money to psychics and they tell you the sorts of things you paid them to tell you, is it really different from pro wrestlers or stage magicians? Or should that be "psychics", "wrestlers" or "magicians"?

Answers to things don't have to be black and white, yes or no. You can also start a process up front saying it's entertainment then manipulate people to the point the initial statement no longer holds.

> But also, a lot of people still believe in professional wrestling.

Being a professional wrestling fan myself, I don't know of any, but ok I'll play along ...

> Are pro wrestlers ripping people off?

I've never heard of a wrestling fan going to a show for life changing advice, or in a desperate attempt to reconnect with their dead child. Nor have I ever heard of a professional wrestler offering such services.

And psychics don't pretend to get into long-running feuds with each other, and pretend to settle those feuds with drop-kicks and suplexes, in front of mass audiences. (At least, not to my knowledge)

Did you think I thought, and was implying, that wrestlers and psychics provided the exact same services as each other?

Because I don't. You get that, right?

> It's not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven't been answered

Ah! You totally can! Every now and them there are news articles about lawsuits against the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

> Can you really be ripped off by psychics?

Once I went to a psychic who offered to read my fortune out of a crystal ball. Later I found out the ball was actually glass. Glass! That's an amorphous solid, the exact opposite of a crystal. How can you divine any truth such a chaotic structure? The very premise is ludicrous; she may have a large glass ball but clearly she had lost the rest of her marbles.

can you really not be ripped off by psychics? I mean come on

even if you did something wrong, do things like that really need to be preserved on the internet under your real name for the rest of your life? Probably not

Why not? It is a historical record of sort, like Nero burning Rome. Does Nero has a right to be forgotten? Also where is the freedom of speech of telling people that Nero burnt Rome?

Nero is dead and dead men don't suffer from a bad reputation. Nero was also emperor, whereas this person is not a public figure. It needs to be proportionate, and "rest of your life" sounds disproportionate for something like this.

It also depends on how unique your name is how badly you will get "punished". My name is unique; as far as I know I'm the only person on the planet with my name. People named "John Smith" have an easier time being anonymous.

(aside: it's not clear that Nero actually started the fire by the way, the sources on it are rather thin and recently some historians have begun to suspect that a lot of what we "know" about Nero was essentially propaganda from his opponents. This is actually another point of consideration here: not everything that's reported is necessarily accurate, fair, or balanced.)

Dead people don't suffer from a bad reputation, but bad people should, dead or alive. Don't want a bad reputation? Don't be a bad person. It's that simple. What you did will be there forever, think before acting.

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