Bane of Baen

On the other hand, if he dressed it up as a fantasy novel, he’d just be rewriting The Lord of the Rings.

Because everybody knows evil only exists in fantasy stories.

And I am supposed to care what you think…ummm…why?

And I am supposed to care what you think…ummm…why?

I’ve just picked up A State of Disobedience in fragment as part of an advance-month Baen Books Webscription, and was just a wee bit surprised by the content thereof. It does seem to read a bit more like a mundane-oriented 2nd Amendment defense novel (see Bracken’s recent [exceedingly depressing] Enemies Foreign and Domestic as well as Ross’ earlier Unintended Consequences, and the linked novels Hope and The Mitzvah by Aaron Zelman and SF writer L. Neil Smith) than the sort of stefnal stuff that I’ve come to associate with Baen’s inventory.

That aside, as you’d pointed out, there’s an element of bigotry in Kratman’s work that’s rather disturbing, and the pro-Republican Party propaganda is absolutely disgusting, evincing a ghodawful sloppiness and purblind partisanship on Kratman’s part. The past century has gaudily demonstrated, the nominally Republican wing of the Permanent Institutional Incumbent Party (PIIP)has been as viciously hostile to individual rights throughout its history as the speciously Democratic wing has been since roughly 1896.

As for Kratman’s stance on voluntary abortion…. Well, hell. The alternative to a woman’s ownership of her body during pregnancy (including the exercise of her right to dump the products of conception the same way she might chug down an antihelminthic to get rid of an infestation of roundworms) is having someone else exercise the right to that property in her person which distinguishes the free individual from the slave.

Kratman makes it obvious that he endorses the employment of violent force to deter or punish the providers of such services as make voluntary abortion a relatively safe and effective option for a woman who doesn’t want to carry her pregnancy to term. That pretty obviously includes either the tacit or explicit sanction of the officers of government, who are supposedly duty-bound to protect the lives, liberties, and property of the people in the polity (including abortionists). He probably wants such voluntary abortion criminalized, too. So who assumes this power in her stead? Do we now face the prospect of a custodial control of women from the moment their pregnancy tests show positive? And how will this be accomplished? High-tech “house arrest” telemetry to monitor blood pressure, urinary protein levels, plasma glucose and fetal heartbeat? Or just an old-fashioned lockdown in a prenatal concentration camp?

Does he acknowledge the fact that if a woman can be denied the exercise of that right to a property in her person, she becomes for all practical and legal purposes subject to involuntary servitude and very real risk of both morbidity and mortality for the sake of Mr. Kratman’s personal third-party sense of moral outrage? Nah, of course not.

I’ve never performed an abortion, and I’ve counseled against ’em whenever a patient has come to me with an unwanted pregnancy. Setting aside the unverifiable bilge vomited by (almost entirely male) meddling religious types, there are risky consequences to the interventions available, not the least of which is the impact upon the pregnant patient’s own conscience. A pregnancy that can be brought safely to term will yield an obligation that other people would be very happy to assume from the mother, and I point out that two of my own kids were adopted.

But I keep available the contact information for those local gynecologists who perform abortions, and I keep these folks on my Christmas card list. They’re sure as hell not in it for the money, and they offer my patients an option that people like Mr. Kratman simply don’t understand.

Y’see, the criminalization of voluntary abortion doesn’t put an end to the exercise of an individual’s right to a property in his or her own body, just as the criminalization of drug use or alcohol consumption doesn’t significantly prevent the recreational or addictive use of psychoactive substances. It just makes the exercise of self-ownership a helluva lot more hazardous while at the same time convincing the person who exercises said right that the government assholes trying to ram their control down the new-made pariah’s throat are the enemy. Worse yet, it obliges that person to consider himself a criminal enemy of the state, and of the society that state represents.

I look forward to the final chapters of A State of Disobedience, but only to determine how Mr. Kratman is going to finish hammering the “Liberal” fascists while weaseling out of acknowledging the moral bankruptcy of his own brand of statist stupidity.

— Richard Bartucci, D.O.

So what are you saying, sweetlips? Are sales the measure of quality? Was Hillary Clinton’s book better than yours because she sold more copies?

(And what does 88% mean, anyhow? I don’t think you sold 88,000 copies on a print run of 100,00, and I don’t think you sold 88 copies on a print run of 100. That’s a great percentage but it reflects more on Jim Baen’s estimate of your popularity than on anything else.)

Oh…did I forget to mention that you are blackballed? You are. Lieing shit.

And Pussy.

Ooo, can I be blackballed too?

Or, how about, “I know you are, but what am I?”

For a more serious note, “lieing” shows me just how important editors are.