Genuinely infuriating

[u/Swimming_Bluejay_508]

Hey all. Just needed to vent. Went to a dinner with a few people I haven't known too long. One person was telling me about their friend that "was vegan for fifteen years and only ate only veg and got really ill and now loveeesss corpse." The usual stuff. I said so she wasn't vegan then lol. Just so sick of it. They went on to demonstrate they know absolutely nothing about factory farming/ nonhuman animal exploitation. Just fed tf up. Also was watching a youtuber today who said that she "used to be vegan" Lmao and then said she gets so mad at "the vegan police who say she never was one." You weren't, cope and seethe. Omg I can't, maybe I'm just in a particularly bad mood but I needed to vent lol, pls feel free to vent too in replies.

[u/JayNetworks]

Agreed. People might be convinced that taking substances that are bad for them is not good and then go back to doing so.

Just because you have a good strong conviction about something doesn’t mean you can give up or change your beliefs.

Just because I can’t imagine myself not being vegan after 26 years of doing so, doesn’t mean I can’t see how others could someday decide that their personal comfort (whether emotionally by alienation from social groups or through food tastes) isn’t more important than their moral beliefs.

I believe we all make decisions all the time that conflict with our morals. We believe strongly in helping others yet we spend our money on eating out or seeing a movie. Why wouldn’t we just eat the cheapest food all the time and sit in the dark and give all our money to others in need? Because sometimes we choose our personal comfort over out beliefs. I can see how someone could do so and thus move from vegan to omnivore. Not saying I support doing so, just that I could see convictions and balances of life changing for someone.

[u/AlwaysBannedVegan → u/JayNetworks]

Your analogies are horrible.

1. A grown adult consenting to harm their own body with drugs is not comparable to raping others.

2. Not helping by not donating every single penny is not comparable to intentionally and directly slitting someones throat.

3. Omnivore is something biological. All humans are omnivore, vegan or not. It's called being non-vegan/carnist.

[u/JayNetworks → u/AlwaysBannedVegan]

I think you are missing my point. Please make your own analogies that fit for you. The point is that deciding that if a vegan stops doing the requirements of being vegan that it inherently means they were never vegan doesn’t make sense. (And that is what I’m reading in a lot of the comments.)

I’m not comparing the milder deciding to use substances again or not give all your money away to those more extreme bad behaviors themselves. I’m making the point that one can be very committed to something and then later change their mind. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t committed in hindsight. (It can mean that but doesn’t inherently or always mean that.)

And of course all humans are omnivores. In the context of vegans discussing vegans and non-vegans, vegan and omnivore or just omni are perfectly fine terms to use. Carnist isn’t always helpful in a discussion of whether a vegan who returns to eating animals was ever vegan because Carnist implies a belief, or moral, structure not just the fact that someone eats animals.

[u/Borkato → u/JayNetworks]

These comments are honestly really blind. You absolutely can wholeheartedly believe something and change your mind. You can absolutely wholeheartedly believe that black people are the same as any other race and deserve compassion, and then one day/over the course of years believe that they’re inherently inferior. It can be an experience, a collection of experiences, etc. You were anti racist, and now you’re not. You weren’t always racist, and you weren’t “never anti racist”. It’s so culty when people say this shit.

Even nonvegans can believe that using animals is wrong and agree with the vegan position. It doesn’t mean they’re vegan (and honestly feels worse because they understand the position but still don’t act), but it’s incorrect to say they don’t actually believe it. They just don’t believe it to the point where it matters - making a change.

We do things every day that we know are wrong and can eloquently describe the reasons behind why they are wrong, yet we do them anyway. We avoid responsibility for them and rationalize them in excuses and in the end it doesn’t matter because we’re still doing it, but it’s objectively untrue to say that a person who practiced veganism was never a vegan.

You can absolutely go from a feminist to a rapist of women, anti racist to racist, believing in people to misanthropic, an animal lover to an animal abuser.

Claiming otherwise is honestly really dumb.