muckamuck: I'm 71. I have no problem admitting mistakes, and moving on to "plan-b".
I often post "back-handed" comments, to bring peoples attention to the factual matters beyond emotional driven decision making. For as long as they are miffed at my sometimes oblique posts, they are thinking about a position different than their own.
Scholarly dissertations, factual data, appeals to common sense, and/or to the common good are often lost in subjects which invoke strong passions, however founded or not those may be.
I post from the perspective that written communication lacks the inflections and nuances of speech, and to partly replicate that, I restate my positions, in a slightly different way each time.
Your posts, muckamuck, seem to be largely emotion driven, with little thought to their actual import or effectiveness. They are also yawningly featureless. Compared to many of the commentators here, you might want to consider an intellectual armaments program.