Archive for November, 2008

Governance and Social Media (Digital Superstructure pt. 1)

I was picking through two old posts, one about the disembodied nature of empire and the other about the shifting nature of political/economic/social authority on a global level, and I started to think about how to apply my older thoughts on such things to my current interest in social contract theory and the growth of [...]

Tweeting the Terror

Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai – CNN.comRough title, there. Yikes. Even I wouldn’t (probably) title something like that. The articles puts out a bunch of really good info. It makes mention of the blood donation/helpline tweets. It completely ignores #mumbai and the use of hashtags. Still, it’s an easy-to-understand “primer” of [...]

Mumbai, Terror, and Response

I’ve been following the mess in Mumbai for the past few hours. As usual, Hashtags represents the best and most live way to keep up-to-date: http://hashtags.org/tag/mumbai. Even though it’s getting a lot of media play, I think it’s important to remember the rather peculiar “ordinariness” of the day’s events. We gasped in America when the [...]

The Digital Contact, pt. 1

I would say that I am a political scientist. It’s not the first thing I do, nor is it the most important, but it’s a big part of my life. I’ve been studying quite a bit about the concept of the “social contract.” In its most basic terms, the social contract is a descriptive theory [...]

Trivial Pursuits?

So I teamed up with some friends of mine from the Korbel School to compete in the first ever Institute of International Education Denver WorldQuest trivia competition. It was sweet, not least of all because my team won. Actually, we tied with the IIE’s own team, but they were just doing it for fun. Plus, [...]

Popular Sovereignty

Just finished a small write-up about the analogy between individuals and states from the Renaissance to the 18th century as well as an analysis of what this means for contemporary international relations. It’s pretty messy – I may repost a cleaner final version someday. Brauhn – Popular Sovereignty

Motrin and Such

The last day or so has featured a flurry of Motrin (yes, the pain reliever)-related activity on the Twittertubes. I was working at the library most of yesterday, so I avoided keeping up with the madness. I didn’t know what was happening, and I figured that I’d savor that and wait to find out today. [...]

Why We Can’t Stand Still

My instructor in my Modern Political Theory class was discussing how political theory, like any good idea, is generally applied retrospectively to a given situation. We aren’t usually able to see patterns until after the fact. Not that this makes theory worthless, of course; we gain a greater appreciation of what has happened, and we [...]

Sharia and the State

I’ve finished up a review of Noah Feldman’s The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. It’s not actually all review – there’s analysis, too. It definitely would not fit here, so it’s been published through GoogleDocs. Take a peek, eh?Brauhn – Feldman and Sharia and the StateTechnorati Tags: islam, sharia, democracy

Obama and the Weather

Eboo Patel has a new one up at the WaPo’s Faith Divide: Obama and the Weather It’s a very keen metaphor that he employs. Forecast calls for SWEET.