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I don't necessarily dispute that claim, but do you have evidence to support it ?
It's extensively covered on the wikipedia page alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device#Uni... Also if you just google "LRAD use in [country]" there are source for any country you're actually wondering about...
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If you were at a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy and somebody used one of these on you, what would you do? I'd either come back prepared for actual violence, or switch from protest to sabotage. It just screams "escalation" to me.
yes, it is an escalation. Governance is maintaining public support for the government having a monopoly on violent escalation. If the government does not have this power, then any person has an individual veto over the rest of the country. Laws are used to describe how and when individuals can protest.
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And that is possibly the aim. When the protests turn into violence or sabotage, the state uses that to justify its own violent repression.
so you saying if there are violence or sabotage, you let these people do it??? how can that be better
Which I think is likely, but also a bad decision. Generally speaking, the job of a legitimate government is to make violent protest unnecessary. So depending on the situation, the best action may indeed be to back down and rethink how things got there in the first place, rather than continuing to provoke more violence. Continuing to escalate is not a sustainable strategy for anyone that intends to maintain power for long, as the numbers are not generally on their side.
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If you were at a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy and somebody used one of these on you, what would you do? I'd either come back prepared for actual violence, or switch from protest to sabotage. It just screams "escalation" to me.
> If you were at a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy and somebody used one of these on you, what would you do? Leave. The moment it turns into a riot you’re doing damage to your cause. (If you’re in a protest and see hooligans, restrain them.)
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Police also regularly use tear gas against US citizens. These are weapons that would violate the Geneva convention, but we're okay with them to disperse a crowd.
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Rationalists like to reduce everything to a simple black and white argument, which tends to inject imprecision and bad understanding into the discourse.
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But nobody thinks that way. If they can kill your friends, they can round you up afterwards and kill you. Once it gets to that point, there's no reason not to immediately organize a military response.
Hold on to that thought we're going to need it this summer.
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Police also regularly use tear gas against US citizens. These are weapons that would violate the Geneva convention, but we're okay with them to disperse a crowd.
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The idea and significance of the proper noun 'The Geneva Convention' is a much different class than just a noun like 'criminal' or 'murder'. The point of invoking it is not to hide behind an abstraction, but in fact to appeal to something specific.
Unless you just read that article as "how to be uncharitable," your point does not make any sense.
These LRADs have always been planned to be used against mass protests, from day one.
Planned? Perhaps. Destined? Certainly. The imperial boomerang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
If you see injustice but do nothing, you invite the same injustice on yourself.
Injustice at it's core is an arbitrary execution of power, so suffering injustice anywhere is to let power stay unchecked which communicates that there are no consequences for abuses of power, which only invites more abuses of power.
If there aren't consequences for power being used against others, there won't be consequences for power being used against you.
Serbia had the LRAD systems on hand, after buying them in 2022, most likely from Genasys, but possibly from HyperSpike. https://genasys.com/lrad-products/ It's a legal gray area in Serbia where the use against civilians isn't explicitly forbidden, so they're playing fast and loose and moving fast to crush opposition. It's better than troops just gunning people down, but for a modern, supposedly civilized country it's…
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Tear gas and more lethal gasses were extensively used in WWI. Afterwards the various belligerents came to an agreement on which weapons were acceptable, and they specifically decided to include tear gas in that ban. There were various reasons they did this (fear of escalation to lethal gasses was the biggest concern) but one specific reason was the indiscriminate nature of the gas as well as the fact that it can caus…
What are you talking about? The canisters launched by police are probably as discriminate as you can be when firing into a crowd. Are you expecting some sort of weapon that can precisely target the rioters in a crowd but leave everyone alone?
>as well as the fact that it can cause unnecessary suffering.
In the sense that "tear gas is just mustard gas", or "protesters have every right to be there and therefore any sort of discomfort is 'unnecessary suffering'"? What amount of "suffering" would you find acceptable?