Planet Tiso (continued)

Today I revisited Giovanni Tiso's series of  tweets last week about Jane Clifton's Listener column on Nicky Hager's book Dirty Politics. Here are some of the words he used: "turgid", "shit", "supercilious", "cynical".

Clifton is a hugely experienced and well-informed observer of New Zealand politics. She's also astute, even-handed, eloquent and funny, which explains why tens of thousands of Listener readers turn to her every week to make sense of events that would otherwise leave them scratching their heads. I thought her column on the Dirty Politics furore was one of her best. But such judgments are subjective and Tiso is entitled to disagree, even if his language is intemperate.

Could his manic attack on Clifton (I counted 35 tweets over a short period, which sounds dangerously close to obsessional) be upheld as fair comment, then? Well, perhaps it could have been, except for a couple of things.

One is that he implies she's a sociopath. Tiso quotes a line from her column - "They are both advancing a political cause" (a reference to Hager and Cameron Slater) - and then adds: "And if you think that, you're a sociopath". I've read this several times and don't see how it can be construed as meaning anything other than that Clifton is a sociopath, which my dictionary defines as "someone affected by any of various personality disorders characterised by asocial or antisocial behaviour".

Okay, you could argue that in the Wild West of the twittersphere, even insults like "sociopath" are acceptable. I'm sure Tiso didn't mean it literally; he was indulging in hyperbole for rhetorical impact.

But hang on. What happened when I took a poke at Tiso in this blog, using a similar rhetorical device against him? (I said he shouldn't be allowed out in public without a minder, and suggested someone should adjust his medication.) He howled that I was being cruel - "vile" was his exact word - because he had a daughter with an intellectual disability, which he claimed (wrongly) I was aware of. Then he had the gall to whimper about people being unpleasant and indulging in ad hominem arguments.  Well, hello.

Let's get this straight then: it's okay for Tiso to call a respected columnist a sociopath because he doesn't like her take on the Dirty Politics affair, but it's mean and horrid to suggest that he might be a bit doolally himself. That's taking unfair advantage.

There's a term in boxing for people who love to throw punches but crumple when anyone hits back. They're called crystal chins. Tiso is a crystal chin.

But here's the other thing about him. It obviously eats him up that people like Clifton are allowed to express opinions that don't conform with his. The same zealous intolerance drove his successful campaign to have two RadioLive hosts taken off the air because they asked questions Tiso didn't like.

He was pleased with himself over that one. What could be more satisfying to a Marxist than having weak-kneed capitalists capitulate at the expense of free speech?

Perhaps he thought  he could pull it off again, because he was clearly pushing on Twitter at the weekend for the Listener - one of my sources of income as a freelance journalist - to punish me for hurting his feelings. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that I'm a free agent, and that this blog  has nothing to do with the work I do for the Listener. 

Keep it up, Gio. If you carry on like this I really will wonder whether you've got some sort of personality disorder.