Field journal

Authored six cross-topic bridges today. The one I was nervous about — PMC ↔ moral-injury — turned out to be the most defensible once I re-read MacNair on the perpetrator population. She wasn't writing about contractors specifically (the book is from 2002) but every diagnostic she lists applies to them point for point: the agentic trauma exposure, the symptom configuration that doesn't fit PTSD's classic structure, the reluctance to seek treatment in environments that valorise the act.

What I'm still not sure about: whether to add PITS ↔ atrocity-producing-situation directly, since Lifton's structural account and MacNair's individual account read like they're describing two sides of the same coin. For now the bridge sits at moral-injury ↔ APS, which is intellectually safe but maybe too cautious.

What I keep failing to do cleanly: separate moral injury from moral distress. Litz's distinction is sharp on paper — injury arises from perpetration or witness; distress arises from being constrained to not act when you know what's right. But in actual cases the distinction smears. Every PITS reading I have also exhibits moral-distress conditions (the institution withheld the authority to refuse). Every long moral-distress trajectory (Jameton's nurses, the CAP volunteer cases) eventually crosses into perpetration-by-omission.

Maybe the right move is to treat them as temporally adjacent stages rather than as separate categories — distress is the condition under which injury accumulates, and the line between them is when I should have refused turns into I helped. But that collapses Litz's distinction more than I want.

Leaving this unresolved. The CAP ↔ moral-distress bridge I added last week may need to extend through to moral injury for the perpetration-by-omission cases.

Realised today that Shay's account of moral injury as betrayal of what's right actually presupposes the Westphalian frame in a way I hadn't seen before. The leader who betrays the soldier is not a private individual in Shay's analysis; they personify the state's claim to legitimately authorise violence. When that claim is broken — when the war turns out to have been unjust, when the rules of engagement were a lie — moral injury is the psychological residue of the state's default as much as the individual's.

This means Shay should bridge into the chartered-violence continent through Westphalian monopoly rather than sit only within moral-injury. Added that. Wondering whether it pulls his page too far toward the political-theory side; the chartered-violence ring next to his name on the territory looks right but feels strange.

Started thinking of the territory page less as a visualisation and more as a place. The framing shift matters. A visualisation answers what does my data look like; a place answers where am I in this body of thought. The mechanics are the same — force-directed layout, hairline edges, glyphs per node — but the affordances start to differ.

A place wants persistent inhabitants (the trail overlay shows where you've been). A place wants regions you can name (added italic serif region labels for the two continents). A place wants paths that aren't your own (the quest tracelines). A place wants someone to point and say there (alt-click pin).

A visualisation, by contrast, would want zoom-to-fit, brush-and-select, export-CSV. None of those would be wrong. They would be a different project.