Progressive Update

I’ve been closeted away in a recording studio the last three days working on a fancy DVD and CD project (details in due course; not to worry–it doesn’t involve my trying to sing or rap), and as such without time to blog away. In the meantime, a number of readers of my “Progressive versus Progressive” series have written in with good comments and links to supplemental material.
Ed Driscoll, the proprietor of the sprightly “Silicon Graffiti” video blogs in the PajamasMedia stable, writes in to comment on my observation about how “Today’s environmental Progressives see dams as high on the list of humanity’s crimes against nature, and want to remove as many of them as they can.” In fact, his latest Silicon Graffiti video, “Forward Into the Past,” discusses this very phenomenon, and how it has gone so mainstream that even American Express has embraced “dam busting” as a marketing tactic (the Amex ad starts just before the 4 minute mark of the video, but you should watch the whole thing). I had totally missed this ad, since Amex apparently doesn’t run this commercial on Fox News. (Ed rounds out this video, by the way, with a recap of the execrable “Climate 10:10” video last year which featured blowing up school children who wouldn’t drink the climate Kool Aid. I had my own stab at this with one of those overdone “Hitler Learns About the ‘Climate 10:10’ Video” parodies, if you still enjoy these. Personally, I don’t think it ever gets old.)
Meanwhile, a Facebook friend, University of Chicago undergraduate Josh Lerner, points me in the direction of Counterpoint, a conservative student-run journal that looks worth reading. Josh offers a worthy short essay about the defects of Progressivism in the current issue, and all I’ll add is that if he doesn’t go on to graduate school I’m going to kick his butt or perhaps something even more serious, like un-friending him on Facebook.
Finally, another loyal reader flagged for me “The View from 1776,” a blog run by Thomas Brewton, who was a student of Eric Voegelin and Walter Berns. One particular entry, “Constitutional Evolution,” bears on the post-modernism of contemporary Progressivism that I mentioned briefly in my last installment, but the site has a number of sensible posts worth taking on board.