Stages of "vegan" retreat

The Ever Weaker Stages of "vegan" Self-Aggrandizement

Stage I - "I live a 'cruelty-free' 'lifestyle'"

A lie.  Everything "vegans" consume causes some harm to animals, which "vegans" 
say necessarily amounts to cruelty.

Stage II - "I 'minimize' the harm my 'lifestyle' causes to animals"

A lie - a lie twice over.  It's a lie, first, because in order to minimize you 
have to measure, and no "vegan" has ever measured. It's also a lie because there 
is always some possible - not just possible, but reasonable - further effort 
that could be undertaken, but isn't only out of a wish for ease and comfort.

Stage III - "I'm doing the best I can to reduce harm to animals" A lie, for the 
second reason in Stage II.

Stage IV - "I'm doing better than you bastard meat eaters" And here we arrive at 
what it always was all about.  And yet, everything is wrong with this false 
claim.  First, it isn't true - there is some meat eater somewhere who is "doing 
better" than most "vegans".  This is the subject matter of the excellent "Vegan 
Shuffle" piece.  It is possible to reduce harm beyond that caused by the typical 
"vegan" with a meat-including diet.  The greater vileness of this claim, 
however, is that it attempts to make virtue a matter of comparison with others, 
rather than doing what is right, and that is never a valid basis for virtue.  
This illustrated by the famous sodomy example featuring Derek Nash and his 
beloved twin brother David.

If David sodomizes the wretched eight-year-old neighbor boy six times a week, 
and Derek sodomizes the lad "only" four times a week, Derek cannot claim to be 
virtuous because he's "doing better" than David at refraining from harming the 
boy.  Note also:  if David increases his filthy acts of depravity against the 
boy to a dozen times a week, Derek could also increase his filthy acts of 
depravity to, say, 10 times a week, and he could still maintain his claim to be 
"doing better" than David, even though Derek is now doing *worse* than he was 
previously.

Virtue is never shown by means of a comparison with others.  Virtue consists 
only in doing what is right, and not doing what is wrong.

The entire "vegan" claim collapses.

* not "cruelty-free"
* not "minimizing"
* not "doing the best I can"
* not "doing better than you meat eaters"

It's all a lie, and the goal of the lie was morally invalid even before they 
started.

Just shameful.