For most Democrats, and for many Republicans, the preferred political stance is one informed by socialism (at least in terms of broadening the "safety net" to cover basic needs - food, shelter and clothing - as well as education, healthcare and employment) in the economic sphere. It is also informed by what may be called progressive secular humanism in the moral and legal sphere.

In more than one video, I've heard Jordan Peterson speak of a right/left divide in what strikes me as simplistic terms. For him, the right is characterized as preferring the efficiency of hierarchy, while the left prefers to advocate for those at the bottom. I've also heard him say that no matter what system of individual value you set up (whether based on IQ, on skill, on education, on the "purity" of "political correctness"...) any system you set up will naturally evolve into a hierarchy. We have, of course, seen this in every government system in recorded human history. The end of history described by Marx and Engels was, according to this view (and all human experience) pure fantasy. We can recognize the truth of this, in part, by acknowledging the point that all systems develop a hierarchy.

One of the more amusing characters from the Popeye comic strip (created by E. C. Segar in 1934, called then the "Thimble Theater") is a hamburger ravenous fellow named J. Wellington Wimpy (although usually just "Wimpy") who is a sort of charactature of an intellectual con-artist. His famous tag line is "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." Surprisingly, he seems to be impossible to find on Tuesdays.

A visit to Dictionary.com's definition of the word "positive" turns up 33 definitions! Why so many, you ask? Perhaps a broad reason is that it's a value word, and in our culture, values are in a tangled mess.

I say "perhaps", because I'm not positive about that.

In this last sentence, I used meaning #4 in Dictionary.com's lengthy list.

Are people aware of how much social conservatives have in common with social "progressives"? For instance: