Nathania

(As of: 2014-03-07)

Nathania is a  (blog+wiki) by Nathan Larson containing his own commentary as well as that of several "sexually dissident" federal prisoners who were interviewed. The material is for the English Wikipedia. Some of it contains personally-identifying information of private individuals, including minors, although this latter content is excluded from Google search results. All Nathania content (including raw wikitext) is, however, included in the Internet Archive.

The content includes Larson's memoirs; analysis of female body types, with an emphasis on the positive attributes of those that who are obese or otherwise overweight. Some of this content contains nudity. There is also a detailed exposé of the Psychology Services Department's practices] and commentary on the anime series. Much of the site consists of intrapersonal communication, including frequently inchoate musings and streams of consciousness, and random personal pastebins, usually without any descriptions or notes. Some content is encrypted with an extremely weak algorithm intended mainly to keep it out of search engine results.

The site name was inspired by the use of "Nathania" as a country name in the 1988 Israel Del Rio DOS game . The Nathania logo is a black flag with a white "N" monogram in.

On 10 June 2014, the wiki was taken down due to a sense that, especially in the wake of the abandonment of the Inclupedia project, keeping the wiki up was largely futile because it seemed to attract persecution without fulfilling its goal of building public awareness of libertarian ideas, as measured in quotations and backlinks on other sites that would be able to reach a larger audience. Without a major achievement such as Inclupedia, Larson fell short of notability and thus there would be little reason for people to take interest in the bliki.

First incarnation
The first incarnation of the site was created in mid- to late-2008, and hosted with 1and1. It had an anarchy symbol for its logo. No record of this incarnation appears in the Internet Archive, so it was lost after the site was shut down for unpaid hosting bills. The domain expired on 3 September 2009.

Current incarnation
This incarnation of Nathania was originally hosted on Bluehost and then Hostmonster. After a concerned citizen submitted a report of "adult content", Hostmonster issued a terms of service violation notice on 10 September 2012 noting that the website would be deactivated unless the content were removed within 48 hours. Eventually, Nathania ended up at Dreamhost; like other sites that use Dreamhost's share hosting, Nathania is subject to frequent performance problems, including internal server errors, although as of February 2014, these had become less common.

Larson believes that there is an active political fight in support for the rights of those with pedophilic attractions, and that the conflict is in "Phase 1". For comparison, "Phase 2" is when there is an active and visible political movement in favor of minority rights, Phase 1 is when the political movement is less visible and more fractionated.

Addition of prisoner interview content was briefly put on hiatus in February 2014 for a variety of complicated reason involving politics and personal feelings.

At RationalWiki
At RationalWiki, an anonymous user commented, "Has anyone seen his gallery of little girls? He even has one picture of naked underage females, and lots of pictures of little girls looking coy. I think this man is a sicko fuck who needs to go away for a long long time, for the safety of little girls everywhere." Abd Lomax replied:
 * A troll added this link to Nathania.org. That is Tisane's page, where he describes his own thinking about "pedophilia," in a detail very unusual for a public disclosure. It is not the thinking of a pedophile. It is the expression of someone willing to go outside the bounds of public acceptability as to personal disclosure. He's taking a legal risk with that page. He could probably defend it in court, each image is legal; however, a claim could also be made that the collection shows prurient interest. (I think the claim would fail in court, but ... he could also get slammed. Parole officers are not fair, necessarily, and they can jail first and ask questions later. The actual text of the page may be offensive to people who dislike honesty. Someone could indeed report this to authorities, and they would investigate. I'm not reporting, because I'm satisfied, reading it and seeing all the other evidence, that he is not a pedophile and he is not a threat to children, and I don't want to waste the time of the agencies. I deleted the material, confirming Psygremlin's removal and block of the editor, and blocked the IP. But the link to the page is relevant. Tisane is showing what images of children are *legal.* He's not correct, though, if he assumes that a collection of legal images cannot be found to be child pornography. I've mentioned already a local case, where someone was prosecuted for having a page of photos that might have been quite like what Tisane has constructed. He lost his job, he lost his kids, and I think he did time. His ruminations on the page are legal, if provocative.

Hipocrite responded, "Looks like pedophilia to me. Reported to FBI via National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at https://report.cybertip.org/index.htm"

In U.S. federal court
On 6 December 2012, Assistant Federal Public Defender Brooke Sealy Rupert explained the site:
 * Mr. Larson heard first-hand from fellow incarcerated individuals about sex offender laws, the treatment sex offenders received by various prison facilities, and the movement to challenge harsh sex offender sentencing practices. Consistent with Mr. Larson’s practice of seeking to help those seemingly shunned by society, particularly through writing, he began interviewing inmates, researching the issues, and writing articles.

On 7 December 2012, U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee expressed his concerns about the site:
 * I really don't have any objection to your having opinions about politics, about history, about government or anything. But when you start talking about sex with children and posting pictures of children in provocative poses in underwear, maybe not child pornography, but it's just odd that that would be a part of your website to me if your interest is to build something that everybody can participate in.


 * When I look on Wikipedia, there's so much information there. You start an encyclopedia at A and go to Z, pedophilia is so far down the line and pictures of children in provocative poses is so far down the line that I'm not sure you could be there in 6 months or 8 months.


 * So it's just strange and it's scarey. Because I have on many Fridays people come before me who say that they were on the Internet looking for adult pornography and somehow stumbled upon child pornography and got fascinated with it.


 * And the federal law is five years in prison, ten years, very, very severe sentences that I'm imposing because we're concerned about people who want to traffic in and use that kind of material.

During the proceedings, the defense attorney, judge, and prosecutor repeatedly got Nathania confused with Larson's other wiki project, Inclupedia. Special Assistant United States Attorney Carol A. Thompson noted that the "defendant rationalized the transcript containing the pedophilic information as occurring in a context of 'avid research,' and the public's need for an internet based encyclopedia that is inclusive, and not exclusive. J.A. 46, 48. Defendant specifically stated that in probing the inmate about pro-pedophilic views, his 'goal [was] to benefit society.'"