Funny addendum to the SeventhSon story. MP Forumers may recall I had some blazing arguments with him in the two political threads over the years (one of which culminated in my removing my old account and taking a break from the Forum for everyone's benefit). I generally couldn't stand him, I thought his posting style was too often designed to rile people up and take discussions on stupid tangents, and I assumed that he couldn't stand me either.
After he got kicked off MP's place he came over here and PMed me, of all people, to ask how to join in the P/R forum. I briefly told him how to request admission, and that was that. I consciously avoided him in the posts he made on here, and stayed a mile away from his P/R threads.
Then, some months later, shortly before he got banned from here but knew it was about to happen, he PMed me again and gave me his e-mail address and social media info, and said he'd love to keep in touch (I haven't, but I did have a clear the air exchange with him, because I was completely taken aback by the difference between the person who posts as "SeventhSon/7th", and the person who was now writing to me as himself).
The point is, in private he's actually a very different kind of person, which I suppose is predictable. He listens in a way that he doesn't in public. Most of what he did was shtick (perhaps even 'trolling'), which was frustrating, because when he wasn't doing that he had interesting and informed things to say on a variety of topics. But his deliberately provocative baiting of "the left" and insisting people "own" positions which he'd dreamt up for them wasn't conducive to proper and calm discussion in my opinion, and I wish he hadn't felt the need to do it.