Secular Café Archive

At Hermit's request, I moved a couple of relevant posts to this thread. Jobar.

Gurdur was mentioned several times now. The alias (or name) rang a bell, but I could not lay a finger on where I have heard it before. Until now. It turns out that he made the rounds of quite a few forums in 2010, when he decided to do something about the abrupt ending of Richard Dawkins's forum. One of the forums he visited was Rationalia. There he started four threads, and all but one of his posts went in them. In the first one he announced his arrival and introduced himself as the administrator of two sites. In the next one he pumped the members for links to particular quotes. Another one was a bit of an interlude concerning the bus campaign.

The fourth came to the nitty-gritty; "An Open Letter from grass-roots atheists to the 2010 Global Atheist Convention, Melbourne, Australia" He wanted comments about, and signatures on it. I was not the only one to point out that the letter was wrongly addressed. Why should attendees of the Global Atheist Convention feel it was up to them to intervene in whatever Dawkins decided to do with his forum? I certainly was not the only one to note the rambling, unstructured path it took. It made the document incoherent.

Gurdur invited critiques of his letter to be submitted to his site. When people accused him of deleting negative ones, he replied that he only gave trolling and dishonest comments the chop. It was a mere coincidence that all comments that were actually critical of one aspect of his letter or another were also either trolling or dishonest.

Unperturbed by negative remarks, Gurdur sent the letter off to Stuart Bechman, AAI President and manager of the 2010 Global Atheist Convention. The reply was predictable. Bechman wrote that he could not make out much of what Gurdur was writing about, and in so far as he could make it out he addressed his letter to the wrong people.

Now, here's the clincher. Gurdur posted: "Response on this has been extremely and welcomingly rapid by Stuart Bechman ... which just goes to show, there's always a happy ending."

I really do not want to have anything to do with Gurdur in any capacity whatsoever. He is a shining example of self-delusion and an incapacity to think things through logically not being confined to fundamentalist theists.

OK, irrelevant but I'll mention this anyway: It amused me that Gurdur describes himself as an Australian living in Germany because I am a German-born living in Australia.

[quote=""Hermit""]
OK, irrelevant but I'll mention this anyway: It amused me that Gurdur describes himself as an Australian living in Germany because I am a German-born living in Australia.[/quote]

Heh. Yeah. There are many stories there. Most I'd rather not recount. The one I thought amusing was that for years, a decade, maybe even unto this day, there are internet denizens who will not type his name in text online. Some thought he had software that searched for mentions of him, which he would follow up to visit.

Otherwise, the stories tend to be 'funny' odd, rather than funny amusing.

I don't want to derail the important thread about merging SC and TFT, but the subject of [post=681258]Gurdur[/post] came up and I'd like to comment.

Full disclosure: I have known Gurdur online and IRL for 12-15 years, starting at IIDB. He recruited me as a member at the Heathen Hangout in 2005, and I remained active there until it closed down in June of this year. I very much enjoyed my years at the Hangout.

Although I haven’t had any direct communication with Gurdur in roughly four years, I consider him a friend.

I realize that he has a strong personality, can come across as abrasive, and certainly rubs some people the wrong way. He has a tendency to dig in his heels and not budge, once he has stated his position. I have not personally experienced these traits, but I have witnessed his interactions with others that could be described in those terms.

Starting about six or seven years ago Gurdur became enamored of the then new platform Twitter, and began to tweet heavily and recruit followers. He seems to have lost interest in forums and his participation became less and less frequent. I don’t know that I’ve seen any substantive post of Gurdur’s in five years. He allowed the Hangout to slip away and he formally closed it in June, 2017.

All this to say there’s little chance of him trying to impose himself on the TFT or SC forums.

Finally, I’ll add that I’ve very much enjoyed my interactions with Gurdur, both online and IRL. I’ve found him an excellent conversationalist, and not the least bit incoherent, wandering or delusional. I know nothing of the Richard Dawkins affair that [post=681291]Hermit relates,[/post] but it surprises me.

[quote=""Tharmas""]I know nothing of the Richard Dawkins affair that [post=681291]Hermit relates,[/post] but it surprises me.[/quote]
I believe all of what you say about Gurdur. Unfortunately, I have never seen that side of him, the interaction I have described being the only time I have encountered his posts. You can check the saga out at rationalia.com, if you are interested. Gurdur behaved similarly, and received similar reactions, at rationalskepticism.org as well.

My experience was one of feeling manipulated. I found him unctuous and insincere.

I witnessed him being a flaming hypocrite. I virtually pissed on his shoes.

He is better being forgotten.

Yeah, I have to side with Roo and Hermit on this one as well. I'm not surprised by your observations, though, Tharmas. That was one of the most annoying aspects of HH.

Gurder would be civil, sometimes downright obsequious to his friends, some of whom were much more obnoxious than him. And at the same time, he would delete posts that did nothing more than disagree with him (no animosity at all), and treat anyone not in his circle with utter contempt.

When confronted with it on multiple occasions (sometimes with screen caps, which was pretty entertaining, I have to admit), he would get really pissed, and often just ban people for no real reason, other than disagreeing with him.

I saw Gurdur as a real-life Jekyll and Hyde. He was capable of being a real gentleman, cultured and intelligent; but to those he didn't like, he could be a real monster, vicious and crude.

I consider myself lucky that from my first interactions with him, way back in 2001, he showed me that Mr. Hyde face.

I expect that there are lots more people who saw him as Hyde, than as Jekyll.

Back when Garnet's private board was running, there was a long thread relating people's interactions with him. Tharmas, you may recall Garnet, and her husband Master Taran (AKA 'The 800-lb Gorilla'.) Both of them, and a good number of others, had been members of the Hangout; without exception, their feelings for Gurdur ranged from real dislike to major hatred. In the course of that thread, it was realized by the participants that they had contributed many thousands of dollars to Gurdur, supposedly for the running of HH; the total was far higher than such a board actually costs. So he'd been ripping them off all along.