I made it up on the spot, to merely indicate that we identify someone's political position on the spectrum by how he relates to someone else. I didn't have a formal metric in mind, as I suspect the author you linked to is trying to define, and I certainly wasn't referring to any political theory I had read or studied. I was trying to point out in my earlier posts political opinions are strung out across a vast spectrum, sort of how we use the terms "hot" and "cold" when we talk about temperature. There is no hard and fast dividing line between hot and cold, it is relative, but we all know exactly what we're talking about when we use those adjectives in a phrase.

Left/Right, or Conservative/Liberal are often described in those absolutist terms, as if you have to be either one or the other. This my-way-or-the-highway attitude is particularly a characteristic of fanatics and ideologues on either side of the political spectrum, to try and condemn anyone who doesn't buy their party line to the last syllable must therefore be a partisan for the other side. No doubt you have noticed how this kind of absolutism infuriates me. It is not a political position, it is a propaganda tactic. Just because I believe in labor unions, socialized medicine and public education doesn't mean I want to round up all the capitalists into camps and gas them. Of course, some of our Conservative friends would like you to think that, and, of course, my cousin Red Robert, or Bolshie Bob, is just as bad on the other side.

There is a phrase in Spanish which beautifully illustrates this kind of absolute all-or-nothing way of thinking: No tan calvo que se le vean los sesos. Loosely translated: Not so bald the brains are visible.

I'll withhold my full judgement on the article you pointed us to, I only briefly scanned it, but I would like to issue a few warnings. First, it appears in a financial website, so it is likely to be biased.

Second, the Sioux and other Plains Indians did not directly compete with sodbuster farmers for pasture for the buffalo. The buffalo were slaughtered to remove the economic basis of the Plains tribes as a military measure, and it was accomplished by the US Army protecting white buffalo hunters who sold their pelts to white customers in the East. The rest of the animals were left to rot on the ground. The farmers moved in later to take advantage of the lack of Indians and steal their land. The killing may not have been planned from the start as a form of capitalist war against the tribes, but that's exactly how it wound up.

Third, his introduction of religion as a gauge of ideology at the end of his essay is demonstrably false. There are as many atheist Conservatives (Ayn Rand, for example)as there are Christian Liberals (like the Pope). It is only on the North American Redneck Right (and in Islamic theocracies) where fundamentalist religion is conflated with capitalist ideology. Maybe I'm biased, but I really don't see much difference between them two.