You slippery devil. Just when I thought you'd settled down... another outburst.

No, THEM is anyone YOU don't like, notably, all those looters and plunderers so eager to get their hands on your loot. TB, you're the one with the binary view of humanity, liberTBarians, and everyone else; no middle ground, no compromises, no neutrals, no in-betweens. Everyone who isn't with you is a villain, as you remind us here every day. I can't think of a more middle-of-the-road, totally moderate group than this one on the Zone, and to you they are Bolsheviks on steroids.

You answered your own question, you answer it every time you post (with monotonous and tedious regularity) here with your paranoia and fear and your insistence that everyone listen--the end is near and the day of reckoning is at hand, and those who don't accept your gospel are condemned to the wilderness.

So while we're making character judgments, let me make a few of my own. You're not that unique and individualistic, TB. Actually, you represent a very common and typical personality and social archetype, they're a dime a dozen these days, representing a world view that may be highly integrated but overly simplistic and still dead wrong. Deep down inside, you can sense in your bones that something is amiss. It's long been coming across to you that someone's been lying to you, that you haven't been told the whole story, that someone made a bunch of promises to you that they had no intention of keeping. So you feel the need to blame it on someone, anyone else, because you can't admit to yourself you never saw it coming, that you've been taken to the cleaners. This world you so love to hate is inevitably the result of the same policies you have championed and relied on all your life. You are so furious you don't even know who to punish for it, so you lash out indescriminantly, and when reasonable people recoil in horror, or lash back in anger, it only provides you with evidence of your own infallibility and their degeneracy.

David Rosen described this mind set (in another context) quite accurately. Does any of this sound familiar?

"Many Americans, especially of the aging white “middle class,” are facing a profound existential crisis. America seems to have failed them. Their world is in crisis, being eclipsed by a new, globalized world order that has left them with neither the financial or emotional security that they were promised. For a half-century or more, they gave their lives, measured in tireless work, ceaseless consumption and ritualistic voting, to a system that is failing them. A global super-rich has taken over and they know, on some deep emotional level, that they were conned into selling their souls for a fiction, the commodity spectacle."

http://www.counterpunch.org/rosen05072010.html

By the way, a vector is an overly simplistic metaphor for what you were trying to convey. The true way to represent a distorted n-dimensional manifold is with tensors. Social space is not a line, plane, or even a space. There are many higher dimensions than you can imagine. Paradoxically, the man-made universe is much more complex than the physical one it is a subset of. You have a mind capable of doing it, open yourself to the possibilities and you will find peace, and wonder.