Folks here are holding natural conversations with each other here about what matters to them. You are pretending to engage us when your primary purpose is write for an imagined audience of outsiders. This is why the natural give and take is so strained for you; because conversation is a pretext for polemic.

I don't see how it's a virtue to ignore the reality that hundreds (?) of people are likely to read a thread. (It might even be considered a bit self-indulgent to ignore that.) I take the same approach on the VP board too, figuring that if I only want to talk to one or two people I'll do it privately.

My participation here does not match your polemic characterization at all. I do not repeat passages, I almost always respond to what other people post rather than starting threads, I respond precisely to the issues they raise and do not try to drag the conversation in other directions, my positions go beyond and sometimes do not match the VP positions, and I speculate about things that are far from the VP message. It's convenient to try to dismiss my views as not genuine for some reason or other -- sometimes you've claimed I'm just blindly following society's line, and now it's that it's part of an insincere marketing campaign.

Generally it's possible for regular posters here to maintain the view that the pro-contact position is clearly right because challenges always fade. Those who stay and are welcomed are those who accept the arguments, the converts, and those are the people you think about. Those who don't accept them either keep quiet about it or go away because of the hostility, and leave this little world safe in its views. I gather that in the past some other posters generated significant controversy, but then they left.

So far I haven't let the hostility drive me away. Letting my hair down is hampered to some extent by the hostility.

You are ... arguing that [readers] need to hear some sort of a balanced presentation. The funny thing about spontaneous sincere conversations by real humans is the lack of addressing a balance.

Maybe I wasn't clear. "Balance" was a meta-concern about how the board should tolerate a variety of viewpoints (which it does). My motivation, in writing a post, is to say what's important to me right then.