Saw that this morning and I just knew someone was going to bring this up.
Four or five years ago, I would have joined you in moralizing. My position has evolved since then. Now I take a more nuanced position.
Uri Geller, as much as you guys love to hate him, was largely harmless. Was going to see him a waste of money? Arguably. But I often say the same thing of Tyler Perry movies, though I know there's little I can do to stop those from getting made, and I'd be kind of a douche to demand people stop watching them.
Most of the people on that list were either ignorant of how mass media actually works, are a bit on the shady side, or are just dumb enough to believe their own press. Like the psychic warrior guy. He accepted a bet with an MMA fighter probably because he genuinely thought that he was the protagonist in his own kung-fu movie. I've watched MMA, and those guys are as close as you get to a real life werewolf. It was a stupid move on his part, and he got exactly what was coming to him.
The thing is, mentalists are not allowed to break character. We're like Stephen Colbert without the satire. I've actually gone to great lengths to portray my own abilities as a mentalist as the product of intuition and study, rather than anything supernatural for a number of reasons, one of them being that I don't want the headaches that are part of the territory with those claims. Some guys can pull that off successfully. I'm not one of them, so I take a slightly different path.
That said, there is an ethical line to be drawn. I don't particularly like most mediums as people, but I have a special, blackened, colder-than-the-void-of-space place in my heart for Sylvia Browne, who has a looong list of morally reprehensible deeds attached to her name. I did research on law enforcement and investigative procedure for a screenplay some years ago, so I have nothing but contempt for self-described psychic detectives. And anyone who claims to be able to heal through psychic powers, persuading people in the process to forego real medicine, should be thrown in prison and left to rot.
The vast majority of psychics however fall under the same umbrella as Uri Geller: mostly harmless. It's not worth the emotional energy of getting upset over them. Save that for predators like Browne.
