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faceh


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 04:13:17 UTC

				

User ID: 435

faceh


				
				
				

				
5 followers   follows 2 users   joined 2022 September 05 04:13:17 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 435

Will do that later today.

it's the admiration and parasocial relationship with the artist.

I do think there's an issue where with AI you can't really make the AI itself the 'object' of your obsessions because there's nothing 'there.' And making the person prompting the AI the object seems extremely odd.

But I feel pretty similar about people who seem obsessed with certain DJs, when there is certainly an argument that all they're doing is pressing "Play" on the computer and then fiddling with some knobs. They still have 'fans.'

But, uh, we see that (some) people are readily accepting AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

And Hatsune Miku has a large following, even does concerts. Granted, the Japanese can anthropomorphize ANYTHING.

I HAVE TO IMAGINE that there aren't many recordings of actual Medieval music around to train the AI on.

I suspect that's just result in there being no more sales on such items, demand would probably smooth out substantially.

Flip side, AI monitoring how much of a given consumable I have left and then ordering it for me (keeping me in the loop, I'd hope) before it runs out entirely, and doing at least some due diligence to ensure its a decent price.

I'm not sure how you can make one that actually prods you to do things unless you give it the ability to physically interact with you somehow.

My phone has a lot of notification and reminder systems, but I ignore those all the time.

I would absolutely argue we're talking a matter of degree, but yeah, if your goal is "live as long as a carbon-based multi-cellular organism possibly can in ideal health" that's different than if the goal is "avoid literally every risk of actual brain death possible, with zero regard for preserving organic parts."

But we're already blurring lines by strapping sensors and stimulators and other mechanical parts in.

Now, to put a final spin on the question, what would you DO with your now-optimized health thanks to your AI patron keeping you in tip-top shape?

My preference for the AI generating personalized entertainment options somewhat answers that question. I could watch Firefly Season 50 and then go to the theaters and enjoy "Mission: Impossible 16: Mercury Poisoning" where AI Tom Cruise sprints across the surface of Mercury while holding his breath or something.

but I wouldn't want to listen to any of this again despite liking some of the genres it's aping.

The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?

I admit that I keep falling back to the same ~1000 songs that I enjoy listening to, very few of which are less than 5 years old, many of which are older than I am. And most 'new' songs I'll play like a dozen times and then they sit in an unused playlist for months or years.

I don't think I've heard a SINGLE pop song in the last year that I consider 'memorable' (not entirely true: Chappel Roan's "HOT TO GO!" sometimes pops into my brain unbidden).

I truly do enjoy Kendrick Lamar's music, but after listening to GNX on repeat for a couple weeks I've not felt any desire to add it to my main playlist. Humble is on there though.

And I lamented before that there's really no such thing as a new 'genre' anymore. So the AI does have the advantage of letting me play around with combining genres to see if anything neat falls out or is worth pursuing.

I am going to agree there's no actual replacement for having a talented live performer in front of you.

I personally will never feel comfortable unless the entire system is airgapped, and maybe not even then. Think, for example, of how you have to keep a pacemaker away from electromagnets.

But life demands acceptance of certain risks, and there's a strong argument that health benefits from AI monitoring your body and suggesting adjustments would outweigh most risks from having that data exposed.

Of course, follow the logic and its just straight up transhumanism. Discard the weakness of the flesh entirely.

What is the use case here? I'm not being facetious, I think this is cool as hell but what is the use case? Composing and recording music is already dirt cheap.

You get 3000 credits a month for $10, and each song gen costs 10 credits. So you can get a couple hundred songs (assuming you're putting in a little bit of effort to tweak each one) each month for less than the cost of a CD back in the day. Whether that's a sustainable price point I don't know.

So we're talking below dirt cheap at this point.

MY use case has been making new high-energy songs to slip into the playlist at the gym, which is a fun process.

But this is also a step towards what I suggest is my preferred use-case: to make bespoke TV episodes, it'd need some ability to compose soundtracks and theme songs and such.

You don't notice the very clear artifacts in the sound?

I've been using Suno for about a year and a half, and its gone from "Constant artifacts that instantly betray its AI" to "If it played on the radio I wouldn't peg it unless I was paying close attention, and even then I wouldn't be sure." It even adds in respiratory sounds for Pete's sake!

Or more to the point, I think that if we did a double-blind test with randomly chosen people listening to AI songs vs. decently skilled indie artists, 80+% of them wouldn't reliably catch which were AI and which weren't, if we curated the AI stuff just a bit.

Given that a Spotify subscription costs as much why would anyone switch though?

Funny you should mention that.

Owing to the absolute dirt-cheapness mentioned above, its a 'viable' (if you cheat) business model to mass produce barely passable songs and upload them en masse to every streaming service under the sun.

And its actually debatable if this really makes the services worse given the fact that most users don't seem to notice or care much.

It certainly makes it harder for new, undiscovered artists to stand out. And that's the one thing AI has going against it. You can't yet attend a concert for an artist who only exists digitally.

But mark my words now, the first large music festival showcasing ONLY AI-produced music will be happening inside of 5 years.


Also, like two years back I talked about how I was still collecting music to my local devices through force of habit. It seems even more laughably futile now in the face of tech which can keep producing songs faster than I can even listen to them.

And more recently we discussed the art of cover songs.

This is also a machine that, if legal restrictions were not an object, lets you translate any given song to any given genre, instantly.

It can emulate just about any time period, and REALLY traditional stuff too.

I'm not even trying to argue that its not AI slop at the end of the day, just like I think most pop music is human-made slop, but its a leap in capabilities.

I'd want absolutely perfect health tracking, the kind of thing where the AI can tell me exactly what to eat, what supplements to take, how much and what type of exercise to do etc. Might require a bunch of implants, but I'd love to always feel well-rested and optimised.

I agree... except I'd be pretty nervous on the nefarious uses that particular setup could create.

My piecemeal solution is that I can feed it the information about myself I want it to have rather than have it tracking me full time.

I do like the thought of being able to ask how to optimize for particular goals. "I'm training for a Marathon in 4 months, create a training and diet regimen tailored to my current work schedule."

This could genuinely be a Paramore B-side.

I know, right? I've gotten it to near-perfectly emulate Rammstein, Motley Crue, and Drowning Pool, and decent-quality ripoffs of Rage Against the Machine and Linkin Park.

System of a Down has proven trickier.

Suno, the AI song generator, just released version 5. And now I think we are 100% past the uncanny audio valley. Version 4/4.5 was at the level of "Convincing, occasionally incredible, but still flawed enough to notice." Version 5 is 'tricking' my ear 9 times out of 10. Studio quality. We have a fully functional infinite music machine available for the monthly cost of a cheeseburger.

A few examples:

https://suno.com/s/N86w28eQjBWbI6fA

https://suno.com/s/BsKe5OnQpUhPj2Zx

https://suno.com/s/voPPxtsXxRjFRF93

https://suno.com/s/Yqe3pzUQHIPAQ4g4

I think people get too focused on the apparent 'slowing' of progress in the LLM space and think its proof that Machine Learning itself is not living up to the hype.

Meanwhile stuff like Video generation, Music, and Protein Folding/Drug Discovery are still improving rapidly.

Arguably LLMs are just the interface by which we can access these other powerful Djinns to provide us with the particular services we want, as we await the "one true superintelligence" that can do anything to arise.

There's probably a small window right now to write a Sci-Fi novel that features humanity invoking individual AI patrons that specialize in particular aspects of the world, in the same vein as 'old gods' (Stockfish God of Chess, Suno God of Music, Midjourney God of Aesthetics).

Anyway, if there was ONE arena you would want AI to reach superhuman capability, one particular application that would improve your life even if AI progress stalled out otherwise, what would that be?

For our purposes, lets just grant "customized pornography" as the killer app.

Me, I think I want the ability to produce bespoke episodes of older TV shows that I enjoyed but were cancelled or went off the rails and/or had horrible conclusions. GoT and Firefly are obvious examples there. But I have several others in mind.

It'd be cool to live in a world where the "Canon" of a given series was not defined by any particular "official" source, but instead you had a whole library of 'forks' in the plot and character development that fans can choose from, or generate their own as they like, with maybe some curation done by the rights holder to identify the entries they deem 'high quality' and consistent with the original vision.

The initial description reminds me of that episode of Metalocalypse where Murderface tries to find religion and attends a Church of Satan service.

The rest just sounds like its a church that is designed to be as politically influential as possible while still legally qualifying as a 'religious institution.' Really lays bare the "Wokeism is a secular liberal religion" factor.

As someone who grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, I genuinely cannot imagine attending a weekly service that WASN'T specifically about paying worship and adulation to an all-powerful deity you believe could intercede in the world. What is the real, actual point otherwise.

I would, no exaggeration, find it less cringey to worship C'thulhu without irony.

I think you end up with MASSIVE selection effects over the medium term.

I want you to think, REALLY think of any 'popular' political streamer who is known to have a healthy home life, wife/husband, kids, no social drama bubbling up.

Probably hard to come up with more than, say, 3, right?

I'll give you Joe Rogan right up front but he's not primarily political, really, and he's now so untouchable that he isn't subject to 'normal' pressures by any means. Also Jesus Christ Joe Rogan is almost 60.

ShoeOnHead is maybe the only one I know who managed to escape the pits and make a fulfilling life for herself relatively unscathed... and she had some close calls.

Charlie Kirk was arguably one of the few who had his life together from the start and maintained his popularity while still being a solid family man. And see where that got him.

The fact is that people who have the time and inclination to do this as a 'career' are less likely to have their life together in other ways, and won't really be able to devote efforts to keeping their domestic life on track if they are serious about staying relevant. And if they are not already in a stable relationship when they get popular, think about the types of people they're now likely to attract by having their face out there next to extreme, controversial opinions. You're arguably selecting AGAINST good partners, maybe even permanently killing your chances of having one.

In short, the ones who will actually stick around (before crashing and burning spectacularly) are already likely to be the most unhinged/unbalanced, and the general pressure is towards more extremism to maintain relevance. The ones who are stable and manage to get a family going will probably fade out naturally when other things just become more important to them.

And you see what that leaves us with.

Consider that one of the secrets to maintaining relevance in the attention economy is to constantly be embroiled in drama and controversy, and thus people who have stable home lives are not only at a disadvantage is how much effort they can commit to the bit, but also having less 'natural' controversy disadvantages them.

And the filters for who gets popular in the first place are arguably worse too. Rather than a celebrity working their way up to prominence doing movies, TV shows, and having to get through a lot of gatekeepers, it is essentially some 'random' ordinary person getting elevated to stardom, and they probably have a lot of personal issues already, which won't get better with fame. Give these people tons of attention, adoring fans, sexual access to women, and the feeling of having power, and expect their worst traits to eventually manifest in full, and there is NO real limiting factor on them, nobody who can tell them 'rein it in bud' and actually enforce that edict.

There are streamers with huge audiences that can swing celebrity guests these days.

Adin Ross got Donald Trump himself.

Even before this event I had been thinking on whether 'late show' hosts were just a redundant dying breed now.

The original idea was that broadcast channels needed to fill airtime after their big, expensive shows finished airing, right? Kids are probably in bed, audience is getting sleepy and winding down. Need some 'light' entertainment that isn't costly to produce and flexible, mostly unscripted. Get a guy that's good at improv, interviews, and generally is charismatic, line up popular guests, give them a band, stuff a live audience in there.

Now, of course, people can watch whatever television programs they want, whenever, as late as they want. Livestreamers put on low-cost, light entertainment programs tailored to exactly whatever audience they target.

Okay, celebrity interviews are still kind of exclusive, but there's many other outlets for those too now.

At this point, a host would need to be particularly talented in some way to capture audiences attention from whatever else they could be watching. Or have an extremely loyal audience. I'm not saying they go away now, but maybe the format has to change a lot, and they're no longer the cultural force with the ability to demand high salaries anymore.

Only time I watch late shows these days is if I'm in a hotel and they charge money for internet service. Then I can flip on the TV and 'channel surf' (man, remember that?) to see if they're doing anything interesting.

On the other hand, shows that have LONG outlived their relevance (IMHO) like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are going pretty strong.

I would say the Republican party has cohered around MAGA far more effectively than the Dems have managed to cohere around... anything.

This seems just patently incorrect to me.

In 2016-2020 there was zero penalty to defecting from Trump as a Republican, talking against him, voting against him (I still recall McCain casting the decisive vote to BLOCK the repeal of Obamacare. When he died he was still given full accolades by his fellow Republicans). They did work together long enough to not impeach and remove Trump, I guess.

In 2020-2024 you have the entire edifice of the federal Democratic party working together to ignore/cover up Biden's increasing cognitive decline. Although plenty of people noticed it, there were ZERO leaks until it was decided he needed to be replaced. And they've been working even harder since then to deflect and diffuse any responsibility now that they've had to admit what was going on. It is truly awe-inspiring.

Compared to how virtually every Trump appointee that quit or got booted immediately went and wrote a tell-all book about how inept and chaotic the administration was.

And now, post 2024, I still don't think the GOP has really conglomerated around MAGA. Its more like they've become content to just sit back and let him do things via the Executive order process and re-arrange deck chairs while he tries to steer the ship.

But you are somehow shocked that they later write a tweet endorsing Harris over Trump?

No, I'm "shocked" someone would spend such mental effort to try to create a persuasive essay in hopes of convincing others to take a particular course of action that... apparently, they themselves didn't find compelling.

Then literally say "whoops, I take it all back, ignore what I said earlier, I'm on the team again" without even a hint of mental distress.

Its like he didn't even believe his own words when he wrote them. So why should anyone else take him seriously on anything ever again?

HAVE THE COURAGE OF YOUR CONVICTIONS, MAN.

So what do you do if they're (physically) much stronger than you?

Be far, far more vicious (gouge eyes out, rip at their genitals, crush small bones. Use hard parts of your body against small, soft parts of theirs.)

Or buy a gun. Train with it. Know what the self-defense laws of your state say about deadly force.

Being smaller, the stakes are inherently higher for you, which gives you both the REASON to be more vicious, and in many jurisdictions, the legal justification for employing deadly force.

Short of someone else larger stepping in,

Find and make friends with larger people. Doesn't have to be a full Master/Blaster relationship, but if you produce some sort of value for the mannerbund, expect them to come to your aid if physical violence is called for.

In terms of ideological conformity, you can also take a look at organizations and institution that have become more left wing over time (almost all of them) and those that have become more right wing (good luck finding ANY).

What happens with Righties when they notice they've been pushed out of a space they like is... they go build a new one, start a new foundation on which to build a new institution. Note this is how Charlie Kirk got his start.

Look at how the Ratio of Conservatives to Liberals as College Faculty has dropped off a cliff since the 60's.

Note, this was precisely the sort of thing Charlie Kirk was trying to combat.

Of course, the left will simply say "Conservatives aren't as smart/don't believe in science/are anti-intellectual" as an excuse for this, as part of that whole "intellectual superiority and scientific backing" shtick. But amazingly the place where Conservative presence is the strongest tends to be the math, physics, and engineering departments, WHERE BEING CORRECT IN THE REAL WORLD continues to matter the most.

It was NOT because the share of conservatives in the population dropped off sharply that they took over colleges. It was attributable to the intentional attrition of activists over a long period of time actively favoring their ideological peers for hiring, and actively making life unpleasant for righties, to ultimately cement control over the valuable institutions. They are very open about the strategy and tactics they were employing. Conservatives/righties generally don't use these strategies to co-opt functional institutions.

And believe me, I can get almost as critical of red tribe politics and belief if I choose. But the central point, borne out by decades of living around both sides... is that Red Tribe will actually leave you alone/accept you as you are much, much more readily than blue tribe, provided you don't start conflicts. Grey tribe is easily the most accepting of all, but tends to lose out to blue tribe operatives due to having no/poor antibodies to their entryist tactics.

One thing that's come into STARK relief over the past week, is there's a pretty noticeable difference between making jokes at the expense of the deceased, which can be bad taste ("too soon!") but isn't a hard taboo, and making jokes that celebrate the person's death directly/condones the act of murder.

I'm talking about stuff like Aaron Sorkin suggesting that the Dems should pick Mitt Romney as their nominee (an EXTREMELY Centrist proposal!), and then walking it back THE EXACT SAME DAY, with zero indication that this caused him any mental distress.

Tons of folks saying "we must have a convention, its the only way!" shut up the instant Kamala was 'announced' as the successor.

That's a level of group cohesion you NEVER, EVER see on the right.

What do you do when a liberal comes to your dojo? It must happen, and while in my experience, most people try to avoid politics on the mat (for good reason!) you're often going to get clues about people's affiliations.

Teach them what they want to know, basically. Then decline to hang out with them much outside the gym.

Its not like there's a hard and fast rule against discussing politics in the gym. But the transaction is simple, they are paying to be a member of the gym, they attend classes, they get the instruction they paid for.

And let me say, I'd argue that I'm a tad left of the median for members' political affiliation. Like I said, I'm grey tribe. Some of these folks are full on Q-anon adjacent, giant-truck driving, gun-nut red tribers.

I walked into the gym on Wednesday and multiple people, including the owner of the gym, were asking me about the Charlie Kirk thing, unprompted. Some of them are extraordinarily livid.

It is good thing that one of our more open lefties (who doesn't confront people about it, to be clear) was on vacation in Texas this week.

This sounds nearly as bad as all those psychologists and therapists reportedly distressed at the idea of having to provide help to Republicans.

Let me point out that I also used to work as a Public Defender, where my entire job was... defending people who were probably guilty. And I took my job very seriously in that respect, even if I found the people themselves distasteful, i.e. people I would not want to live around.

The way I solved that issue was:

A) never actually asking them if 'they did it.' I always just said "whatever story you tell, make damn sure it is consistent."

B) If it was clear and obvious that they did it, or they said they did it, I treat my main goal as making the state do their job properly. If the state screws up or lacks evidence to convict, my job is to point that out and try to create a valid defense. If the state fails to convict... that's on them.

From a sheer professionalism standpoint, I can set aside any feeling I have about an individual to provide them a service that they are 'entitled' to due to my contractual obligations. That is perfectly in keeping with my principles and social norms.

Separating my personal feelings out and teaching a lefty how to fight is easy, in that paradigm.

Also, getting buff and learning to fight is one of the things that can make a guy more right wing. SO I like to think I'm keeping the politically moderate guys from falling into Leftism, even if I'm not winning over lefties.

I have no intentions of confronting any individuals who do not confront me first.

Hence my point:

I still inherently wish to treat any individual person, even if they identify as left-wing, as an individual who has worth and dignity in their own right, even if they're hopelessly compromised by their ideology and will never have their mind changed.

I would not join a gym where the majority of the members were lefties. Freedom of association. I don't think the lefties at my gym want me dead.

But I do not want such people to have political authority over me in any way.

And because I live in one of the reddest areas of a Red state, they simply do not have political authority over me, so no lefties I know personally read as a 'danger' to me. But as a whole, coherent group...

I can live with that arrangement, blue tribe completely politically neutered and fringe enough that they are unable to ever effect any outcomes. If any get violent, they get exiled instantly. That's tolerable to me. But we're a long way from that arrangement at a national level.

This is approximately why I'm now ironclad in my belief that I do not want to share a country with anyone left of, say, Bill Clinton. I don't want them dead. I want them to leave. Preferably of their own accord. I don't even mind paying for the tickets, as long as they're one-way and they aren't coming back. And if they won't leave, I want them to generally be as miserable as possible until they wish they had left.

Lefties are just not suited for sharing a country with other citizens who have differing belief systems; they cannot be trusted to cooperate (or 'not defect') on core issues regarding the country's safety and security, and they will generally prefer foreigners over their own neighbors in any dispute, it seems.

Yes the famous 'heat map' study is very flawed, but the point made by said heat map has been confirmed in varying ways by different studies. Lefties try to sympathize with 'everyone' (and often entirely non-human things, or abstract concepts, like "the environment.") and as a result often end up sacrificing those that would 'actually matter' to them.

Lefties also have far, far less diversity of thought within their circles than righties. It is in fact safe to assume that whatever any given lefty says they believe reflects very precisely what all of the other lefties believe. And they'll henpeck their own into line as needed.

This crystalized for me when I watched everyone on the Dem side fall into line behind Kamala Harris as Biden's successor in one day, even ones who had, that very same day, said she was the wrong choice.

Lefties are far more likely to cut off family, friends, and other relationships over 'minor' political squabbles. So you can debate them in good faith, and still find that they come away hating your guts if you don't capitulate, and then cut you off so you have no hope of ever changing their mind. This concept is so absolutely backwards compared to how I try to manage my relationships that TO ME It reads as entirely alien and incomprehensible behavior.

Lefties have no good theory of mind for their political opponents. They believe they know what their opponents believe, but they tend to fail the ideological Turing test badly. So its that much easier for them to demonize opponents for things said opponents do not actually believe. See aforementioned point about intellectual diversity.

Lefties also have that distinct tendency to claim intellectual superiority and scientific backing for their views, but also tend to be completely wrong on some of the most important, core facts about reality. The most egregious one being blank-slatism as it pertains to human beings and their mental development. Their battle against reality on this point has done untold amounts of harm, and its impossible to even have a discussion on the degree of nature vs. nurture in their framework. I don't want to be forced into their framework, I want to have the actual debate. Which probably requires removing the people preventing it.

And of course as we have now seen, it is pretty much incontrovertible that more lefties than righties tend to support, or at least excuse violence as a means of settling political disputes, up to and including murder. Not all of them, but a significant amount, and these members are NOT policed by other lefties so they have an outsize effect. My first encounter with this was back when the Charlie Hebdo murders occurred, and I went on Reddit's /r/anarchism subreddit to find them twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why killing a bunch of cartoonists wasn't exactly the moral abomination it sounds like. You can still find some remnants of their discussion.

In my view, it shouldn't be so hard to say "murdering non-violent people is BAD" regardless of how offensive they are.

I can back up each of the above points with various studies, but I apologize I'm not taking the time to do that at this moment since I don't have them all immediately handy. I'm not trying to just 'boo-outgroup' here, I think that observable, reliable facts of the world are reflected in what I said, and this informs my own belief on why I don't want to be around them. Maybe I'm the one with the twisted morality and worldview.

Ding me for that if you must, mods. I'm not calling out any particular persons on the site with this, I swear.

And while I don't immediately give righties/red tribe a pass, by any means, I could throw together a comprehensive explanation of why I prefer to live around Red Tribers rather than Blue tribers, and maybe will throw that together at some point. Ultimately it comes down to Righties being more 'genuine' in how they comport and portray themselves, and more in touch with baseline 'reality' where it counts.

I consider myself red-tinged Grey tribe, and it has become clear to me that I cannot, over the long term, co-exist with blue tribe, for reasons I have no control over, and I'm leaning a bit more in favor of 'conflict' theory over 'mistake' theory these days.


Note, I am literally only stating my own personal beliefs on the issue, and I still inherently wish to treat any individual person, even if they identify as left-wing, as an individual who has worth and dignity in their own right, even if they're hopelessly compromised by their ideology and will never have their mind changed.

I'm not calling for any particular actions against any persons, and I've already arranged my life so I don't encounter many blue tribers as I go about my daily business, so I'm not going to take any different personal actions.

But if you're asking me to make policy recommendations, I can't very well carve out exceptions for the few that I personally like.

Well that's extraordinarily bad timing to release a film with a politically motivated assassination as the finale.

we get an early scene where we learn more about the political situation on the radio.

Thanks, I already hate it and I never read the novel. The "early movie news broadcast that specifically sets out the state of the world" is insanely lazy almost every time it is used.

we even get a flashback scene where the secret police drag Garraty’s father out of his house in front of Garrety, and then the Major PERSONALLY executes Garraty’s father.

Ah yes, how can one create emotional stakes unless the main protag and the main villain are personally acquainted.

The Major concludes the speech by shouting that he believes the Long Walk could get the nation to raise the GDP until the US is the number one economic power in the world again.

Clearly this film is about 10 years out of date and should have been released during the short craze for "Young teens killing each other in a game set up by a dystopian authoritarian government" that The Hunger Games triggered.

Only thing that could have made it worse, it sounds like, is if they specifically leaned into the "Battle Royale" parallels and had McVries do a Fortnite Dance while the Major screamed "WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER."

Yeaaah.

The subtext of all the celebrations is they want it to happen again. And again. And again.

If it were a lighting strike, well, they have no way to influence that. Its wishful thinking at worst. Though still repugnant.

When its a targeted murder, then yeah, condoning, celebrating, and encouraging it IS influencing it to happen again. Its inviting another of their number to step up and do it for glory, for the cause, for their tribe.

Whatever you want to call it, it is the opposite of telling people to stand down.