Standing Athwart Commercial Redevelopment, Yelling "Stop!"

Back in 2004, I linked to a Radley Balko post on what he dubbed “the conservative left“. Balko wrote:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today’s left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol’ days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we’d now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I’m not kidding. They’re that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a “sign of our sad times.” No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn’t something romantic about the old-stye “family farm” that’s deserving of government protection. Innovation isn’t celebrated, it’s excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dyanmism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2000, “Well, look who is standing athwart history now.” Here’s but one of an endless number of examples, as An Englishman In New York photoblogs a protest with C-list celebrities to block commercial redevelopment in Brooklyn.

(Via the Pajamas motherblog.)