I have a gender fluid sister-in-law who steadfastly refuses to believe that me, a Libra, should be married to my wife, an Aries, for reasons involving the moon.
She cannot grasp the dissonance of being able to freely choose your expressed gender identity yet also the inability to resist the pull of the moon and choose your preferred spouse.
Just curious - What makes Miss Cleo more of a fraud than Joel Osteen and his ilk?
Did anyone say she was?
My local has a function room out back. Was booked last year for “Psychic Mike” or some such shit.
His posters were a work of art, and fiction, obv.
Took about five minutes before they were defaced with all sorts of disparaging comments including, of course, a speech bubble with the words: “I see dead people”.
Naturally, and I’m sure you’ve all seen this coming, he cancelled the show. Apparently due to lack of ticket sales rather than unforeseen circumstances.
Birds of a feather; she wasn’t ‘worse.’
They are simply more successful at the con than she was; arguably, Miss Cleo’s grift likely harmed fewer people.
It helps that Joel Osteen is a white man pushing a prosperity doctrine ideology that at least some Americans are already inclined to embrace because of the protestant work ethnic combined with mass mediated capitalism…
At least in those days we had James Randi.
Here’s a good one on horoscopes…
I remember at the time someone pointed out that if telephone psychics were real, they’d call you.
That’s very cool someone tracked down the facts and made that video.
Her fake Jamaican “shaman” or whatever character is actually a trope, pretty similar to The Oracle and even more, Tia Dalma in Pirates of the Caribbean. Because it’s a trope, a very tired one at that. Given that the writers of both the Matrix and Pirates would have seen plenty of Miss Cleo, I wonder if she inspired them a little bit, or it’s just a really old trope?
To be clear, I don’t think miss cleo was ever charged with anything. It turns out that it is is not actually a crime to convince people that a Jamaican lady with tarot cards could see the an individual person’s future over the phone and furthermore would do so for a few dollars.
The owners of the call network she represented were charged with deceptive billing and advertising practices – instructing their call center operators to tell customers that the reading was free, that they were granted additional free time, placing them on hold while 1-900 charges added up, and not including call cost information in their advertising.
The former is unethical and harmful, but the latter is illegal. But it’s easier to blame the fraud on the outrageous spokesperson that everyone knows from TV (especially when she is a woman of color) rather than a couple of anonymous white dudes that actually ran the scam.
Then there’s the Myers-Briggs evaluation, which is a horoscope that companies are willing to pay for.
Oh god, thank you. M-B is bullshit made up from whole cloth and the traction it gained in culture, business, and schools is unconscionable. Nowadays there are dozens of copycats going by other names and you can’t get any sort of management training at a company these days without being exposed to one of them.
That’s catching on in Asia these days.
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