My name is Danijel Turina, born 1973 in Zagreb, Croatia. I have a confusing tendency to wear multiple hats – yogi, religious philosopher, programmer, geopolitical analyst and philosopher, (retired) businessman, writer, photographer, teacher and God’s garbage disposal unit. This blog got started in addition to my main website, because I wanted to create a vessel for my articles when wearing my geopolitical analyst hat. However, as things go, I started mixing things up with my other hats, and this became the main website, and the old website became the archive. I know people today find the concept of one person doing multiple things well super confusing, but believe it or not, before the present-day norm of intellectual colimation, that used to be the norm. Being super-specialised to the point of being an expert in one thing and an idiot in everything else isn’t actually a normal human condition, which is why I found formal education to be a poor fit for my mental profile, and decided to take care of it myself. The result isn’t some kind of a meadow with many short blades of grass, where I know a thing or two about everything, but a tree with multiple thick branches; essentially, I have multiple interests, and I tend to get very good at things that interest me, especially since I tend to persistently invest effort along my main areas of interest for decades. Also, I tend not to bother with things I’m not good at, because I know I’ll never get really good at them and it wastes energy that would be better invested in something I actually have a talent for.
I was born and live in Croatia, and yet I write mostly in English these days. It was a choice I made when I started writing geopolitical articles, and it stuck; I wanted to make the content universally understandable and accessible, and Croatian language just doesn’t do it. This is not a very widely known website and I have no expectations of great popularity, but still, I didn’t want to intentionally limit the audience with linguistic constraints, especially since I write English well enough that it shares the role of a primary language for me. I sometimes honestly can’t rememember in which language I wrote something. Interestingly, since I don’t actually speak English on a daily basis and spoken language uses a different part of the brain, my spoken English is actually worse, merely due to the lack of practice. It is what it is, I guess. I think it would catch up if I had the opportunity to use it regularly for a few months.
My style of thinking is an unconstrained “what if…?” tree. This is a very poor match for ideologically programmed people who are trained to act with instant outrage to any heretical thought, such as “what if Hitler was right?”, even if the conclusion ends up being “no”. I don’t start my thinking from conclusions; I actually use scientific methodology whereby I postulate a hypothesis, and then follow it to either a dead end or something actually interesting. Basically, I require things to be backed by some demonstrable reality in order to warrant acceptance, and acceptance of anything remains perpetually contingent upon verification. This sounds like skeptical methodology, and yet I absolutely despise skepticism and skeptics, becuse my inner life is that of faith, trust, confidence and love. A contradiction? Sure. But I trust what has proved to be true, valid and good, and it is being continuously tested at every moment. Also, it makes me very resistant to deception and bullshit. I am known for radically changing my mind when proven wrong. I never defend error, because my thinking is always reality-based; choosing between a formerly held belief and a new understanding of what reality is, it’s a non-issue for me.
I am not a generic instance of anything, and I felt no need to make my life a generic instance of anything, either. I carved my own path because I found no existing instance of path object to fit my purpose. My religious philosophy is my own, because my relationship with God is my own. My political beliefs are my own, unconstrained by common definitions. My family structure is also specific. None of it is meant to be a pattern to be reproduced by others. There’s one thing I would highly recommend, and that’s having the nerve to actually choose your own life, thoughts and actions, instead of being an incarnation of patterns pre-defined by others.
— Danijel
My e-mail is danijel973@gmail.com
I don’t own any social media accounts. If someone on social media says he’s me, he’s lying.
My new PGP key ID is 9F909B51, fingerprint: 531D 3369 DD00 ED6C BF5E 6959 7793 59CB 9F90 9B51
My old PGP key ID is D1DECCE7, fingerprint B575 30FE B193 4E22 C2ED B8A7 53C1 BAFC D1DE CCE7. It is being replaced due to 1024-bit key length not being enough today.