Holding the Line
And how do we do it with intention?
What does it mean to hold the line?
I suspect this one will cover some ground. A trigger warning should go without saying at this point, and a hot, comforting beverage is probably in order.
A few weeks ago, Prince Andrew was arrested in connection to his part in the Epstein files. Not for raping underage girls, of course. But for dissemination of state secrets in his emails.
A friend pointed out that they’ll prosecute him for the charges they think they can actually convict him for. Rape, especially when the primary accuser is dead, is much harder to get a verdict on.
I don’t care.
I admit to being completely irrational about this.
And in fact, that is the point.
A trial attorney I follow on Threads pointed out that there are rules about how information like the Epstein files is presented to a court, especially when there is a lot of very bad stuff.
It’s not just dumped out onto the floor in boxes with no regard for context. In fact, it’s very specifically against the rules to do that. Because that kind of inundation is considered to be a psychological assault.
Do you understand what I’m saying?
The United States government is guilty of assaulting its citizens at scale. And they did it deliberately.
They pushed out millions of documents, records of depravity and filth, such that the world has never acknowledged before to this degree, while insisting that there was nothing to be done about it.
Fucking obviously I’m not rational about this.
They don’t want us to be.
It’s much easier to ignore us if we’re “irrational.”
It’s much easier for them to do what they want while we’re distracted.
The conflict in Iran predates the Epstein files by decades, and yet, many things can be true. The connections here are both visible and under the surface, and it is beyond the capacity of any of us to stay on top of all of them.
Again, that’s the whole point.
In American football, there’s a coach whose only job is to make sure that all of the players stay behind the line. He’s called the get back coach. Swearsies.
You see, each team is only allowed a certain number of players on the field at any given time. Extra players can result in a penalty. Even just having a toe over the line counts.
The nature of the game is that players are constantly rotating in and out of play, which can mean dozens of players standing around waiting for their turn on the field. And these guys are professionals, so they’re also engaged in the game—watching and cheering and crowding the line, and thus, the get back coach.
“Get back guys! Get back behind the line,” is his constant refrain.
I freely admit, I love football.
I am a fan of sports in general.
However, let’s call a spade a spade. Team sports are basically state sanctioned tribalism. It’s us against them. Sports soft launch this mindset in our lives at low stakes, so when the stakes are higher, we’re happy to go along.
And there’s something completely fascinating about a coach whose entire existence is based on holding the line.
On maintaining the status quo.
Words mean things.
History matters.
And many things can be true.
However, one of the keys to a fascist government is a centralization of power. In the last year, power has been so thoroughly DEcentralized and distributed away from any authority, such that when the Department of Justice says they won’t be pressing charges against anyone in the Epstein files, there’s nothing that anyone can do.
Not even Trump. Even if he wanted to use the Justice Department or the files as his own twisted version of kompromat, nothing works like it used to.
And while he’s responsible for a lot of the breaking, the mechanism of the status quo is so strong in this country that the OUTCOME would probably have been the same regardless of who was in the oval office. There’d have been a lot of finger pointing, and calls for accountability, but when it actually came down to it, we’d have rugswept the whole thing.
Because we’ve done it before.
In fact, if Trump weren’t in office, we’d be a whole lot more complacent about surrendering to the pedophile broligarchy than we already are.
The transfer of power to the technocratic elite is just more legible under this administration. But trust me, it’d be happening either way.
Want proof? Look at how much business Germany did with the world in 1939. Even during the war, the black market for German brands was booming. Cars, fashion, stolen art, music (I can’t explain the fascination with Wagner, but it was a thing). Absolutely nothing stops commerce, legal or not.
I don’t have to imagine what people will do to get their hands on black market AI models. And they already exist. Grok is a fully sanctioned legal model, still undresses children (especially boys), and it’s being used by the Department of Defense to program voice activated drone clouds.
Who needs science fiction?
So much of what’s breaking right now is the status quo.
In a 2024 ranking of the happiest cities in the world, Minneapolis came in first. Obviously, that ranking doesn’t account for its current occupation by ICE, but it DOES account for its resistance.
Even before ICE, this was a city with what appeared on the surface to be a lot of conflict. And you’d think that with ICE’s constant presence in the city, that people would be fleeing.
But that doesn’t appear to be happening.
Despite the fact that the city is basically on lockdown, mutual aid efforts and legal groups appear to be keeping people housed and fed. (The situation is fucking dire, but the work is happening.)
And commerce is still happening. In fact, people are buying houses in all of this. The data is sparse, but if I had to guess, the slightly depressed market is allowing first time buyers to dig in. These are people who already live in Minneapolis, and are very defiantly not leaving.
It’s that defiance that’s worth taking note of.
Because resistance is a form of holding the line, too.
It’s a declaration, that we have chosen, and we would rather die than cede this territory.
It’s happening right now, all over the world, in countless places that we neither know or care about, because it pales in comparison to the resistance at large.
And this week, it happened at Anthropic.
The Department of Defense (excuse me, the Department of War) has declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, because they refused to…checks notes…spy on American citizens, or allow the model to be deployed autonomously, without a human in the loop.
I have enormous respect for Anthropic and Dario Amodei’s willingness to hold the line, even at great cost.
And this will cost them a lot. Because Pete Hegseth has also threatened to use the War Powers Act to seize Claude’s function as essential to the government. It might even work, especially since they’re now using Claude in active combat, in the war they just started in Iran!
Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has swooped in to grab that contract, claiming that the DOD is granting them the very same concessions that mark Anthropic as an enemy of the state.
And it’s Trump, so that’s not even hyperbole.
These are the conflicts that shape what tools we use, and why.
What does it mean to hold the line?
Only you can decide.
Ready to make the switch?
If you’ve decided that Anthropic’s line is worth standing behind (and you built something real in ChatGPT that you don’t want to lose), I made something for you this weekend.
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