I first met leftists — real ones — when I finished the fifth form (grade 10, year 11) and got a job for the summer shoving sheep carcasses. A fair number of the students at the factory were members of the fourth (or fifth? internationale). They were almost arrogantly confident in their confidence of the inevitability of progression.

And their contempt with anyone who disagrees with them.

@pukeko60 I have to give it to you: it's one of the top 10 stupidest things I've heard in my life, but you gave it your all @nerdyjewishgrrl

— Giovanni Tiso (@gtiso) August 18, 2014

Well, a bit of background. I was married for some two decades: during the last few years of this period my then wife worked in a union health clinic in the poorest part of Auckland, and I was a community psychiatrist in a clinic about 400 yards further down the road. One of the people who founded that clinic was in my medical school class, and he had was married to the (Then alliance, it was that long ago) MP Laila Harre. So I met her.

Did not like her, because she was power hungry: more overtly so than even Helen Clarke, who (as my local MP at the time) I had seen open various things. But I never expected her to take the silver of a millionaire who was trying to subvert the monarchial republic that is New Zealand.

However, Tiso considers me a moron. Apparently I’m in good company.

On that occasion Tiso gave a remarkably convincing impersonation of a sane man. Almost had me fooled. Then someone drew my attention to his angry stream-of-consciousness yapping on Twitter about Jane Clifton’s latest Listener column. I’m now convinced that he’s unhinged and shouldn’t be allowed out in public without a minder.
Tiso can barely contain his fury that the Listener’s respected political columnist should have a different take on the Dirty Politics affair from his own. Such is the far left’s embrace of free speech. But you have to allow that Tiso is at least consistent in his intolerance of views that don’t square with his own. This after all is the man who, to his surprise and delight, managed to get two RadioLive hosts pulled off the air because he didn’t like what they said during the Roast Busters furore.
What’s most intriguing is Tiso’s apparent conviction that an eager world constantly awaits his latest pronouncement. He appears incapable of leaving Twitter alone for more than a few seconds. Given that he clearly doesn’t have enough to do, perhaps some kind soul could offer him an honest job; he’s bound to have a doctorate in something useless.

It is worthwhile noting that the haters decided to call Karl du Fresne evil because of this, as it is apparently wrong to state that someone is unhinged. Tito commented there:

Knowing as you would have from the Kim Hill interview that my daughter is intellectually disabled makes the “medication” comment exquisitely vile, Karl.

I do have concerns about outing your kids in any kind of twitter or blog exchange: du Frense was playing at Tito, not his kids. The kind of fragility that many such bloggers have is all to common. Besides, disability does not mean you are stupid, or unhappy, or necessarily on medication. Tito is small beer.

On the other hand, Tito and his friends generally will allow speech. They generally understand that you cannot engineer humanity. And that remnant of sense that means that they consider any comment about psychiatric illness as vile should mean that they will be on the barricades with us calvinists and papists against the truly noxious.

Richard Dawkins says it is 'immoral' to allow fetuses with Down's syndrome to be born: http://t.co/nCOo0jSRaE pic.twitter.com/JiTiCBBbMZ

— nzherald (@nzherald) August 21, 2014

There are none so arrogant that consider part of humanity as subhuman, as vermin, as not worth living. Such people are truly blind, and in their blindness they leave their humanity behind for the shining chimera of their ideologies.

Do not be them, nor be like them.