Okay everybody, I think maybe part of the problem here is that terms for “woo-woo stuff” vary widely and often don’t have set standard definitions.
Kinthalis, I didn’t mean to contradict you; I tried to make it clear that I completely support your viewpoint by saying “fortuneteller” (what Ellen Cherry said) instead of “psychic” (what you said). Because to me, a “fortuneteller” is a Gypsy or semi-Gypsy who reads your palm, or maybe reads Tarot cards or possibly tealeaves. A “psychic”, on the other hand, seldom has any roots in an ethnic or cultural tradition, is not constrained by conventional expectations with regard to the actual services rendered, and in short, while they may be genuine, are just as likely to be either straight-up phony or have delusions of grandeur with respect to their “gift”.
I very much doubt that many genuine psychics can be found working for the “Psychic Friends Network”. On the other hand, outrageously conservative (IMHO) people like Ronald & Nancy Reagan and Tony Blair are known to have consulted astrologers regularly, astrology being arguably a form of “fortunetelling”.
To me, a fortuneteller is expected to utilize some conventional form of divination and then assay the results in order to provide you with an opinion as to likely outcomes to a given course of action, or to events left as they are. They may simply make uncomplicated predictions about your future in terms of “destiny” or what have you. In either case, the information thus relayed may be construed, strictly speaking, as “advice”. But it is finite in scope and term; and if they are way off-base, you just don’t go back. Honestly, I don’t see a fortuneteller as someone you go to but once in awhile anyway – it’d be, to me, sort of like having an MRI and then going back for a second opinion. You don’t need it unless something really changes.
And finally, to clarify what I said about insistent debunkers possibly having other issues at work; and to answer (sort of) Czarcasm’s question with respect to an example of someone making a big stink over a minor superstition of someone else’s:
I like Shai’tan. (The Doper, not the Well-Known Adversary.) He is clever and witty and strikes me as fair most of the time. So it is with all due respect that I say, I don’t think his sense of scandalized shock (partially in jest perhaps though it is) would have been the same if the table in question was, say, a really ugly avocado-green pedestal jobbie from the suburbs of the 70’s that someone else wanted his wife to keep, and he hated the table, and she insisted that she wouldn’t have it because of the (alleged) hex-putting history of its former owner.
I suspect that in that situation it is possible that instead he might have admired her for coming up with a relatively unassailable (i.e., subjective and personal) excuse to toss the thing.