Rational Security: The “Dog Days” Edition
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2023
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott beat back the heat to dig into the week's big national security news stories, including:
- “ECOWAShed?” We are now several weeks into a coup in Niger, a country once seen as one of the more reliable Western partners in the Sahel region and home to French and U.S. troops who have been helping the Nigerien military combat a local Islamist insurgency. Even as the Nigeria-led Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, has threatened sanctions and intervention to unwind the coup, neighboring states like Burkina Faso and Mali with close ties to Russia and its Wagner Group have threatened a military response in kind. What might this coup mean for the future of the Sahel? And how should the United States be responding?
- “A Tale of Two Sittings.” Former President Donald Trump is now the subject of two different criminal indictments, each of which is being overseen by a very different judge in very different ways. What should we make of their divergent approaches thus far? And what does it mean for the effectiveness and legitimacy of the justice system in these highly polarizing cases?
- “KOSA, No Sir.” A bipartisan coalition in Congress has rolled out a new version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, that seeks to respond to concerns raised by digital rights and civil liberty groups while still taking steps towards protecting children online. But many on the right and left aren’t having it. What should we make of this new proposal and the reactions it’s provoked?
For object lessons, Alan invoked his father-of-a-son credentials to recommend Christine Emba's recent piece, "Men Are Lost. Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness." Quinta recommended the Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett mash-up, "Good Omens" (the book, not the TV show). And Scott shared plans for his homemade improvised pizza oven, which he set up on his gas grill with just some fireproof bricks, two baking steels, and a heavy dose of grit.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair, that's patreon.com slash |
| 0:16.8 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:36.0 | I'm Geo Kokotakis, intern at LawFair with an episode of rational security for August |
| 0:41.1 | 13, 2023. For today's episode, the team at LawFair decided to cross post this week's episode |
| 0:48.1 | of rational security, a podcast hosted by Scott R. Anderson, Quinta Duresick, and Alan |
| 0:53.7 | Rosenstein, in which they cover the week's big national security news stories. Today's |
| 0:59.1 | episode is entitled The Dog Days Edition. This week, Anderson, Duresick, and Rosenstein |
| 1:05.5 | sat down to discuss the possible implications of the coup in Niger for the future of the |
| 1:10.5 | Sahel region. The different approaches of the two judges presiding over Trump's criminal |
| 1:15.2 | indictments, the Kids Online Safety Act, and more. This is rational security. |
| 1:23.7 | I'm not feeling it at all. You know, feel good. What's going on, Alan? |
| 1:32.7 | My wonderful, beautiful, immensely precious, germ vector of a toddler, brought the latest |
| 1:40.5 | upper-tory respiratory. You got a little bit of summer flu floating around. |
| 1:44.8 | I just, I got to say, I mean, colds are never pleasant, but somehow in the summer, |
| 1:50.1 | they're just, it's like, it's like insulting. Well, the summer flu, if you haven't been |
| 1:54.5 | keeping up on your social media on your, on your COVID social needs has been the fact |
| 1:58.5 | that there's a COVID wave going around, and people keep referring it to it as the summer |
| 2:02.2 | flu, because they don't want to admit it's, they have COVID and have to shut their |
| 2:05.9 | restaurants down. It does stink, though. I sympathize. I have been wrestling with, I think |
| 2:10.7 | our allergies, but maybe it's a cold. I don't know, with toddlers, it's all just up in |
... |
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