Thoughts on Kirk \ Did Charlie Know He Got Shot
This is more or less going to be two short essays on related topics. I will start talking about on different responses to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a political question and finish talking about whether Charlie had any knowledge or experience of being shot, a question of conscious experience. Let’s begin.
Thoughts on Kirk
On September 11th around 6am I found out Charlie Kirk had been shot and was fighting for his life in hospital. The video was circulating of the moment he was shot, and it was clear that he needed a miracle to make it. I went to sleep within 30 minutes of Donald Trump announcing his death, I went to sleep with a feeling of dread. That the world I departed when I went to sleep could be a radically different world than the one I woke up in. That we were facing something akin to the Reichstag burning in 1933. Hitler used this moment to remove the civil liberties of his political opponents; it is at this moment Germany left its proto-neoliberal society[1] for a firmly fascistic one.
Fortunately, I was wrong, the US had not devolved any further into the plague that is political violence, and Trump did not reach for power any more than he had prior to the 11th. The worse case scenario had been avoided. When I went to sleep the reactions of political pundits were respectful. Both Hasan and Destiny had said it was bad and that it struck very close to home for them as they both speak publicly and that they already had fears of this happening to them. People on twitter were being irreverent but that’s twitter’s MO.
I have found Ezra Klein’s statement has most aligned with my own views, seeing his statement being so deeply maligned is disturbing to me. Mine and Ezra’s perspective is that there are two levels of opinion on Kirk. We could not disagree more with his political prescriptions, that the US’s gun laws are acceptable, his desire to protect certain elements of American Culture from outsiders and the whole host of views that are downstream from evangelical Christianity. I really do have a long list of political and philosophical positions that I deeply disagree with Charlie on[2]. So that was the first level, the political proscriptions, the second level is beliefs about how we should spread our message. Charlie’s whole strategy and what he died doing was spreading his idea by speaking to people. Charlie’s assassination has to be easiest thing to disavow for anyone who values open societies. We should make decisions by trying to educate each other and taking our best guess. This is what Charlie spent his life doing and was very effective at doing it. If we say that shooting people we disagree with because they are to convincing or persuasive is such a terrible position and stands in stark opposition to the values of that our societies are built on. These sort of actions so often lead to the erosion of open societies.
A topic that has been done to death but the slide from the Roman Republic to Roman Empire was marred with political violence. The political violence of Clodius’s gladiators and the response of Milo showed a whole generation of Romans, which Caesar was part of, the efficacy of political violence. The late republic was a place were voting started meaning less and less and having the strength to win a civil war was what mattered, until it was no longer a republic.
Did Charlie Know He Got Shot
If you have not seen the video of Charlie Kirk being shot, I think you should keep it that way. It is a disturbing video, while I have seen video’s of cars flipping or people firing bullets in the direction of other people, this is the first time I have watched someone die.
Kirk was speaking asking clarification on a question he was given, he gets hit by bullet and he is dead. In movies when someone’s throat is slit they are grabbing at their neck and someone looking at them can figure out they know their neck is bleeding. The same can not be said for Charlie. The bullet hits Charlie, his head flops back, blood come pouring out of his neck and there is no sign of life. So the question stands, at any point between when he got shot and when he was pronounced dead, did Charlie know he got shot?
I read some people online say that the reason he so quickly loses consciousness is the combination of the immediate drop in blood pressure in his brain and the sheer volume of blood pumping out of his neck. That it is an extreme version of standing up to quickly. I have collapsed from a combination of standing up to quickly and low blood sugar levels before, the conscious experience was that of being aware that I might be about to fall, hearing the people around me and the physical sensation of holding the door. I had no “conscious” thought, nothing like knowing a or b, only sensations.
I believe that the combination of a lack of blood pressure and blood rushing out his head and neck would have a much more severe effect on his conscious experience then my experience of light headedness. I feel confident asserting that Charlie may (although unlikely) have had some experience of the sensation of being shot for at most 2 seconds but that any propositional knowledge was completely absent. Another way I could say this is that the last coherent thought Charlie likely had was about the question he was answering.
A potential counter argument would be that we do not know anything about what happened between when the video ended and when he was pronounced dead. I do not give this argument any weight as time would be a factor against him, not in his favour. There are other questions like is that a favourable way to die, however I think they are inappropriate at this moment.
[1] Calling inter-war Germany a proto-neoliberal is very shaky, the point is that it turned from a form of parliamentary government that we could recognise to Hitler’s authoritarianism.
[2] It is amazing to me that I think that some people I know may doubt this fact while it will be patently obvious to others, political partisanship produces such a horrible bias.
