Comment by fnordpiglet 11 hours ago
I suspect this government isn’t receptive to commentary from anyone other than only one person. While I’d never discourage anyone from advocating their beliefs this feels like at best a waste of energy. They are going to do it because they decided to do it - the solicitation of comments is performative and required. The only way to stop it is via the courts and by voting next November.
You are 'this government's best friend, advocating for their opponents to give up and quit. In a remarkable pattern that I never thought I'd see in the rugged individualistic, idealistic, freedom-loving USA, a large group is literally self-defeating: They defeat themselves before even getting out of bed.
That's why your opponents are unstoppable - because you don't stop them. The performative nonsense is their aggression display.
They still want to win the election. Political and policy outcomes aren't all or nothing; the more they see, the more it will nudge them in whatever direction you want. Others will see it and it will nudge them too. If one person didn't embrace being a quitter, others would do the same.
The government isn't one person, and I think both bureaucrats and judges are actually quite receptive to lots of people - only it's nebulous to who and why. Trying to please, and hoping to get rewarded, but neither you or they themselves are 100% certain of by who. Opaque power structures, everyone's paranoid, including the powerful.
There's even precedent for the current president's agencies compiling some pretty sketchy "comments" in the past due to not doing basic sanity checks on pretty obvious fake comments that happened to support their agenda, like when supposedly seeking input from the public about repealing net neutrality[1]. There were so many duplicates that only thirty 30 unique comments made up 57% of the overall total, and the second most common "name" among the authors was literally "The Internet".
No one in the current administration cares about what random members of the public think about their policies, and that's by design. Even the government positions that are intended to be permanent across administrations aren't a safe bet at this point with was things have been going
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/11/29/public-comme...