| The cricital pages: index » The malignant cult nxivm (K.Raniere) » Comparison between K.Raniere and Billy Mitchell (King of Kong) |
This page is a work in progress.
I got thinking about the similarities in the case of Keith Raniere and Billy Mitchell, after:
1. reading an article on frankreport.com about a guy called Asunsolo, who still believes in Raniere and in his innocence, and who says in an interview that he doesn't think he is brainwashed,
and
2. watching a video on youtube on the case of Billy Mitchell's fake performances in which 3 former supporters tell the story of what went on when they tried to find out the truth.
It is actually possible for certain types of people to be manipulated and they don't realise it. Derren Brown did a psychological experiment to show this in one of his TV series. Asunsolo is likely not even a truth seeker which means it will take him a long time to realise the truth (possibly many years, see below). Related to how long this realisation can take, my view is that it is a waste of time to convince a sycophant such as Asunsolo.
The first similarity is that both supporters, friends, who claim that these are good guys, who are trying to improve the world or who are helpful and friendly, even charitable, but the truth is different.
Steve Wiebe tried to improve on the record for the classic arcade game Donkey Kong (1982) in the early 2000s. A couple of producers found out about it and about some of the weird people involved in the scene around "Twin galaxies" (score verifiers and keepers of the tables of record scores that are/were considered the reference) and thought this situation would make a good film. They twisted some facts but most of that is not relevant to what I will discuss. The film portrays the rivalry between Wiebe and Mitchell, who always said he only performs live, but strangely he submits videotaped performances, that have no sound. Why? That there is no sound is supposedly because of a converter used to record the output. This was not a good reason, it is actually quite easy to record the sound too. The real reason became clear many years later, in 2018. That these performances were accepted was a point that some people already at the time of these submissions didn't like. Mitchell was given preferential treatment in getting records accepted that were not verified as per the normal ways. Mitchell actually co-owned it seems all the time, and he was on the board of the company Twin galaxies. The other owner was Walter Day, a friend of Mitchell, which already explains a lot. When I watched "King of Kong" I was also very criticial of Walter Day, in that he was clearly playing favourites. The extent of that was shown by Twin galaxies with the new owner Jace Hall in their counter suit in 2020 in which they showed that Mitchell's "Gamer of the century" award was actually awarded by Walter Day, not by Namco in response to his 'perfect' Pac-man score. People like Roy Schildt questioned who else was in the running for this award. Clearly nobody because this was nothing more than cronyism. But here I am getting ahead of the time line.
Back I think about about 2009. Dwayne Richard, who was a friend of Mitchell, saw a lof of things that he didn't like, and years later eventually made the documentaries "Kong of con" and "The perfect Fraudman" about Mitchell's dealings in supposedly being the first to achieve a perfect pac-man score.
Another vocal and even earlier critic was Roy Schildt, who put up some videos on youtube after a supposed dual record set in 2010 by Mitchell, stating that it was weird the booklets about it were already printed a week later... In another video from I think it was 2014 he stated that he thought the reason that Mitchell stopped playing after getting a certain number of points instead of continuing to get the highest possible score he could get, was because that would attract too much attention and thus scrutiny and in that video he explicitly stated again (as in King of Kong) that he thinks Mitchell's performances are fake. And he was right...
It turned out that it is possible to see the differences in transitions from one screen to another by the way the order of drawing on screen is different. The cause of this is that with the emulator the framebuffer (=screen memory) gets written to just as in the actual machine, but its output gets displayed by the emulator to the PC screen in one go, whereas with actual hardware the microprocessor writes into video memory which gets output whenever the video chip accesses it, and this process interleaves with writing to video memory. Checking the versions of the emulator MAME, it turned out that with versions available before his first fake tape, the sound output when playing Donkey Kong was pretty bad and a dead giveaway to a MAME performance. This means that if he wanted to use this emulator, Mitchell would have needed to record the output without sound. That explains that...
In 2019 Mitchell started to take legal action against the new Twin galaxies. I think it is likely that his reputation was affected so much that he saw this affect his business (restaurant and selling some barbecue sauce), but it could also be simply because he is a narcissist. He provided no technical evidence, only witness statements. These are of course of no value in direct comparison with technical evidence, because people don't all know what to look for to know a real performance, some people may have bad memories, others may be friends and talking along. It can only add value for certain types of situations in certain types of cases (e.g. 'he hit me' is pretty clear evidence of what one is trying to convey, but that may still be fake evidence in case someone is lying, and that possibility has to be weighed in any court case).
More to come.
References:
- There is a lot to read, so much that it could take you a few weeks if you were to read the entire dispute thread on twingalaxies in which the evidence is analysed in steps, but for the essential information see this post on donkeykongforum where the evidence was also placed: http://donkeykongforum.com/index.php?topic=2055.0 and a good overview of the entire case can be found e.g. here: ersatz_cats: twingalaxies: A-long-lost-interview-with-robert-mruczek-has-revealed-yet-more-evidence-against-billy-mitchell
- Videos:
- There was a video by Apollolegend which was a good summary about Mitchell's fake direct feed Donkey Kong video tapes, though not everything in it was correct and the information in it was almost entirely obtained from the Twin galaxies dispute thread and/or the donkeykongforum, which he didn't acknowledge in his video nor in the description. He removed it after caving in to legal pressure from Mitchell. Mitchel is litigious, just like Nxivm/Raniere...
- Of interest in the light of "Guinnes world records" almost certainly caving in to legal pressure from Mitchell and restoring his scores in their lists, is:
Karl Jobst Guiness video (2020): "Guinness World Records Should Stay Out Of Gaming"
- Roy Schildt video (the material from this video that I discuss is from 2010, the complete uploaded video contains much more later material and was uploaded in 2014): DK MC Conspiriacy pt5: at 2:37 At about 2:37 Schildt interviews Todd Rogers about Mitchell's dual world record that he apparently didn't even plan, but even more interesting at about 5:29 where Schildt describes a magazine "Video game collector", and Schildt says: "Billy got his record a week ago Saturday, and here is the magazine, and it's already got his record in there, if you can believe that.". He further comments on the fact that Mitchell is there the week later at the "big bang" event (the same day that Schildt is recording that section, and asking Todd Rogers about it), but that there are no Donkey Kong machines to play on. He clearly implies something fishy is going on (i.e. that there were no machines the previous week either and that the printer for the printed booklet likely already knew the scores before that date. It turned out by the way, that the printer of that magazine/booklet was a friend of Mitchell...). Note that in "The king of Kong" (released 2007) Schildt already states that he doesn't believe Mitchell's scores are real...
- Karl Jobst video 1 (2020): "The DUMBEST Lawsuit In Video Game History" About Mitchell suing Twin galaxies for removing his scores and banning him for submitting non-arcade scores as arcade (Note that scores achieved on emulators are acceptable but they need additional verification, esp. an INP file that can be analysed of inputs the player makes and that can be used to re-create the game play).
- Karl Jobst video 2 (2020): "Gaming's Biggest Conman Billy Mitchell Is Being Sued For Millions!" About Twin galaxies (the de-facto official record keepers for high scores for classic arcade games) filing a counter lawsuit aginst Mitchell and Day for artificially inflating the value of Twin galaxies for a sale, by keeping others out of the books for the first 'perfect' pac-man, and for getting Mitchell to have the Donkey Kong record in a sense creating value from being a well-known figure head for classic gaming in general and Twin galaxies in particular.
To understand what goes on in case of Raniere you don't need to know anything about cults, just about how people can be influenced, and how narcissists (this goes even psychopathic narcissists) behave to make people think that they are 'great'.
To show this I will show the similarities between him and Billy Mitchell. Billy Mitchell achieved notoriety in the "King of Kong" (it is a docu drama, some stuff was edited to imply certain things that are not correct, esp. the record holder at the time was NOT Mitchell, but another guy called Tim Sczerby), which is about high scores of the classic arcade game "Donkey Kong". When I watched it I felt "This guy is a psychopath". On the other hand, people who knew him personally usually told how he was positive, friendly in the restaurant he owns and in interacting with people on fairs about classic gaming, and who did things for charity. People who mention such things usually say (and believe) that Mitchell was portrayed as the villain in the film, but I saw the unfriendly jokes and facial expression that shows what he is actually like. Some people said after the film "King of kong" came out, that Mitchell played the bad guy in the film, but it's the other way around. In reality he plays the good guy when trying to make others think he is a good guy and his true essence is the bad guy...
About 2 years ago it was shown that he is a liar who created fake performances via an emulator, and his behaviour towards people in interviews during and after this process to find the truth, shows exactly what he is like (and that showed me that I was right). The positive experiences that people have come from him being a narcissist who wants to be idolised and seen as 'the greatest' and thus he spends time and effort on making people think that. The whole story is very long and only interesting if you're interested in old style computer games and the technology involved in the evolution of computers and emulators, but I will point to a segment of a video with 4 people, 3 of whom initially supported Mitchell and thought the issues brought up were fake and that it was a witch hunt by people going after Mitchell because they didn't like him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ww2ytE9758 "Interview with former members of "Team Billy Mitchell" (Steve Kleisath, Carlos Pineiro, David Race)"
One of them was simply interested in analysing the facts and from knowing Mitchell's friends tried to defend him, 2 others didn't believe the accusations of fake performances or had a conspiracy theory to explain the criticism, but in the end they all found out the truth. One of them took a long time to realise the truth, almost 2 years, still believing up to then that someone may have altered evidence (which were the video tapes of his performances, which indicate on close examination that they were created using an emulator), until there was evidence that showed that to be impossible...
One of the persons who was a friend of Mitchell says at ca. 1:45:00 :
"It's unbelievable, I don't get it, how there is certain people, now, a few people, who are so loyal to Bill, It's like, I know they are smart enough to understand what the facts and the truth is of this situation. I don't get it. They must think they are getting something out of it"
There is a combination of factors that may lead them to disregard evidence in both cases... This is esp. the fact that many people disregard negative stories about their friends, and they then tend to disregard evidence as coming from a conspiracy or from a manipulation of evidence. You see exactly the same behaviour in the group Nxivm-5, a bunch of steadfast supporters of Raniere who believe he has done a lot of good, is well meaning, and that the evidence against him of child pornography was planted on the camera/external hard drive.
[ Note: I showed in my analysis (to be published soon, I give mr. Parlato the opportunity on his site first) that the 'expert' whom the Nxivm-5 hired didn't take into account the obvious effects of the intermediate PC which almost ertainly would have had a timezone aware filing system at the time (ca. 2005, likely XP using the NTFS filing system), on file times of files on filing systems copied between them via that PC, where the other filing systems are not timezone aware (such as FAT16 and FAT32), and with that I could explain away all time changes with a simple explanation, and the remaining 1 file that was changed in EXIF data was likely manipulated by Raniere himself. The simplest explanation is always the one to go for first! In case of Mitchell the evidence that some people thought might have been faked were the video tapes of Mitchell's performances. However, to alter frames on a tape is very difficult, then you need to make everything look perfect in the same style of 'imperfection' that the tapes have coming from an analog input... Further it was extremely unlikely as the signature that showed the differences was only discovered ca. end of 2017 and eventually TV recordings were found from 2006 that already showed these signatures, which was before the person whom the defenders of Mitchell thought may have altered evidence, could have done so. ]
Similarities between K.Raniere and B.Mitchell:
What is different in these cases is that Raniere is pretty good at hiding his facial expressions (but he is piss-poor in hiding that he is emotion poor in his talking and in his writing, which is typical; I've never encountered an anti-social or emotion-poor person who can hide himself in writing or in talking).
More to come.
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Last modified: 2020-11-21