To me the terms left and right are meaningless. If left includes socialism I'm against it and if right includes conservatism and xenophobia I'm against that as well. I'm a libertarian adding left or right to that classification is meaningless in my opinion.
Perfectly describes the paradox of this nonsense left/right scale. Socialism is far left and xenophobia is far right, except we supposedly live in centrist political system in the West. And yet, we experience bizzare extremes of socialist policies (e.g. bank bailouts) and very blatant xenophobia from centrists governments (British government started an "Immigrants Go Home!" publicity campaign).
Re: conservatism. Everything in it's place, IMO. I'm conservative when it comes to traditions and good principles. Just not conservative when it come to businesses and technologies that don't make sense any more.