ebay brings the hammer down on mystic mercentilism

So ebay is going to ban the trading of spells, hexes, blessings, tarot readings, horoscopes, and other forms of commodified woo:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19323622

From my experience of ebay dispute resolution, it is bad enough when you have a disagreement over a real, tangible product that can be photographed, inspected, shown to be unfit for the advertised purpose, etc; so Dog help those who are unhappy with a defective love spell that they handed over good money for. I know some might be unsympathetic towards people who would buy occult services on ebay, 'a fool and his money are easily parted' and so on, but I think it will be an improvement for ebay to close the door on what is tantamount to fraud, even if it's just so that they can wash their hands of having to spend man-hours on dispute resolution for intangeble products and pushing up the cost of running the site. It is almost certainly the cost cutting factor that will be ebay's prime motive for the ban rather than a true desire to protect mugs from charlatans.

Your intrepid hero never ceases to be amazed at the diversity of snake oil preperations bought by people as a 'spirituality' or 'philosophy'. So-called spirituality has always been in bed with worldly commerce, whether it was a state sanctioned clergy being given the right to tax the population with tithes in exchange for promoting the divine legitimacy of the ruling classes, to the 'spiritual' capitalism expoused by new age gurus who are in the business of selling the individual their own personal enlightenment or 'healing'.

At the best of times the commodification of the creative efforts of humans has it's own self-perpetuating logic beyond the mere generation of exchange value. It leaves somewhat of a taint on whatever it touches, and nowhere does it stink more than to sell out the intangible stuff of human experience. This kind of exchange can only work by some degree of fraud, of convincing people that there is a lack where there is none, or otherwise profiting from another's ennui or unhappiness without offering anything of real use beyond some convoluted mysticism or re-enforcement of wishful thinking.

I buy a bag of rice because I cannot grow the stuff myself. To see people buying 'spirituality' from self-professed gurus and other assorted cranks to me is just sad.