It's not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.
But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.
The difference is that food isn't a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can't source sustainable Mario Kart.
No, hold on, those two things aren't remotely the same.
It makes sense to work out which kid belongs to which parent, for sure. For one thing, a whole bunch of the legal system is based on who inherits what when people die. You want some way to keep track of that. There's some weirdness about keeping track of the father rather than the mother, and some cultures keep track of both or of the mother first, which makes more sense, but that's a different conversation.
But "who's paired up with who"? Absolutely not. Why would it be more convenient to be unable to separate sexual partners from descendants? That is not a practical thing. And the stuff that's preserving, which is that women are historically treated like children without full legal autonomy and part of the stuff being managed by a paterfamilias, is fortunately no longer true.
And of course once that gets recognized enough that even a bunch of Christianity admits that not all relationships are forever and reintroduces divorce (after centuries of treating women like perpetual property of their husbands) it makes absolutely no sense to have half the population ping-pong between names over their lifetime an arbitrary number of times. It's not only logically absurd, it is actively inconvenient to both the first goal of pairing descendants but also administrative bookkeeping in general. I can only imagine the amount of public records errors induced by women changing their name a bunch of times over their lifetimes.
Okay, but what says their perspective takes precedence? You're saying it's normal for them. Cool. I'm saying it's not normal for us.
Why is their normal a higher priority than our not normal? Either "normal" is a meaningless concept or you need a better justification than that.
And by "Europe" you mean "the UK"? Because that may be relevant.
But in any case, then I'm trying to explain the wrong thing to the wrong person. Whether you look at this like an American or not, you're not one. You may or may not have noticed the differences I'm talking about, but you're not part of them.
You're just a performatively anti-system European who is conflating the current system with capitalism. Libertarian, I presume from your example (in the proper use of the word, as opposed to how Americans use it).
That's not the American way of looking at it I'm calling out in the article. The American way of looking at it is asking people to organize not because they're a countercultural movement, but because they see individual action repeated over many individuals as how collective action works. They may or may not be seeking a change of system or regime, but they see political action as something individuals do by themselves to nudge the government leviathan around.
This lady isn't saying organize the way you think about organizing as a leftie libertarian. It's not committees and assemblies and worker self-governance. It's bourgeois liberals complaining to the manager, to which they are entitled as paying customers, in enough bulk to force a specific change. Different things altogether.
No, wait, why can you phrase it that way but not "it's not normal but they think it is".
Why is one of those statements not equivalent to the other?
I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say.
At most I can point out that regulation and organization are entirely unrelated. Regulation is a binding act from the republic, organization is a form of pressure from the public. Entirely different things.
If there's a difference in perspective it's the difference in perspective I've been trying to explain to you: you think you're an individual that is part of the public and is organizing to generate action in someone else (the republic, presumably), we think we're part of the republic and we're collectively regulating. How the public opinion translates to the collective action of regulation is important but incidental. We are the ones regulating as a group, everything that leads to that collective choice is the mechanics of politics, but the government isn't a "they", it's a "we".
That's even dumbing it down, or at least trying to express it in... American-compatible terms. It's not quite right.
Okay, so it's not normal.
It's me speaking, I say it's not normal here, so it's not normal. By your definition.
Of course if we dispense with the pendantry we would argue that the point of saying it's not normal is to highlight how it's inconsistent with the approach of society towards the rest of itself, so a society where women change their name to take their husband's is not normal because it's inconsistent with the rest of the mores regarding the interactions between men and women.
But that'd require not nitpicking a thing to pick a pedantic fight online that is a waste of time, so... not in the scope of this conversation, I suppose.
You added "a lot of places". It's not typical or expected here, so it's not normal here.
So "normalcy" on this is geographically bound. So is it normal if my normal and your normal are different and the Internet is making us rub our normals together?
Told you it was a waste of time.
I am fascinated by her middle name being Karen.
For the record, my conclusions about Americans are not derived from poor Ana's one article. I've been exposed to American-ness before. Even if I hadn't had to spend time at the place for reasons, it's kind of inescapable.
To your question, my observation of Americans' perspective on public affairs is that they're often seen as an aggregation of individual action as opposed to collective action. Their history is taught as a collection of anecdotes around individuals, they see things like climate change as this personal responsibility thing. They understand public stuff like education or health care as this transactional thing where you pay taxes or fees and you get a service in return. Sometimes individual, sometimes as a weird clump of local things. Their news are local news, their politics are hugely personalist. They get excited about indivduals getting into politics when they present the right optics, they get disappointed in specific individuals when they present the wrong ones.
There is just no sense of politics in its proper meaning. It's all some scale of an aggregation of individuals, it never smooths out to the next level of the collective. This article does it even when it advocates for getting over that exact effect:
The solution is my voice, my vote, and my refusal to stay quiet. That’s why I’ve made it a point to educate myself by reading reports from Climate Central. I seek out climate justice events, so I can show up informed and ready to push for change.
And if you’re spiraling too, don’t do it alone. Organize. Call your reps. Vote like the planet depends on it, because it does.
It is hard to explain how weird that sounds. No, Karen, it is not your voice your vote and your refusal to stay quiet. It's a global issue where you are barely making a dent on anything. You are irrelevant.
When we talk about it over here it's all about global action. International negotiations, trade deals, global targets. At most national regulations and progress in electrification and decarbonization. Where do we stack up on solar power? Should we ban cars in city centres? Is the grid coping with the increase in renewable generation?
You don't "call your reps", you vote as a country for prioritizing this or you don't. And when the government is in charge you fiscalize their actions based on their results. It's not this personal relationship with a representative, it's a collective choice to decide what we're going to do as a group. Regulation is just how we make that choice as a collective.
It's hard to pierce the cultural veil to explain to you guys how strange it seems to look at it your way. To me, anyway.
No it is not.
Voting with your wallet does nothing. It's a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.
Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there's something to vote about. Most people don't.
And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn't count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.
So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.
"I asked cocaine to make me a birthday card for my nephew. It's not as polished as the one I bought in the shop, but the cocaine one was a lot cheaper"
It... may not cover every scenario.
"I refuse to watch that one Argentinian TV show that has a shot made with some cocaine". Better, but bit harsh. Maybe there's some value to it.
"Cocaine is fairly practical to tell me things I can verify at a glance, but I wouldn't trust everything it says". See, that one works worse that the real one.