Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn't be comfortable posting in public.

Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.

This thread certainly hasn't made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster -- and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual -- who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic ("openly," at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.