Nathania

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(As of: 2013-10-25)

Nathania is a bliki by Nathan Larson containing his own commentary as well as that of several sexually dissident US federal prisoners who were interviewed.[1] It appears that all the material is inappropriate 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.[2]

The content includes Larson's memoirs;[3] analysis of female body types,[4] with an emphasis on the positive attributes of those that are on the pudgy, chubby, or plump side;[5] as well as accounts of controversies concerning women who have purposefully become obese.[6] Some of this content contains nudity. There is also a detailed exposé of the Template:W Psychology Services Department's practices[7] and commentary on the anime series Template:W.[8] Much of the site consists of intrapersonal communication, including frequently inchoate musings and streams of consciousness, occasionally as walls of text or in the style of Jon Arbuckle's most angsty, lonely, or depressed utterances in Garfield Minus Garfield; logging of mood states and accompanying thought patterns;[9] and random personal pastebins, usually without any descriptions or other explanatory notes. Some content is encrypted with an extremely weak algorithm intended mainly to keep it out of search engine results.[10]

The site name was inspired by the use of "Nathania" as a country name in the 1987 Israel Del Rio DOS game Template:W. The Nathania logo is a black flag with a white "N" monogram in Template:W. This has been described as "narcissistic" and, indeed, the site openly embraces the ethos of egoism/egotism.[11]

Incarnations

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 apparently all the data was lost when unpaid server fees resulted in the site's becoming unavailable. The domain expired on 3 September 2009. Example urls from the old site are:

• http://nathania.org/index.php5?title=Short_answers , short answers prepared circa 13 September 2008 for the Cathy Lewis show What Matters on the political topics of transportation, energy, the housing crisis which existed in 2008, education, and the Chesapeake Bay area watermen.[12] One critique of these answers, as they were posted to Nathania, was that the first half was a bit wordy and also used words that don't resonate with the public.
• http://nathania.org/index.php5?title=Parliamentary_procedure , an essay on parliamentary procedure created no later than 9 September 2008.
• (URL unknown) A table comparing and contrasting (if memory serves) the attributes of proxy voting, along several different dimensions of desired characteristics, as practiced in government, nonprofit nongovernmental organizations, and for-profit companies.

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.

New prisoner-related content ceased to be added in February 2014, the stated reason at that time being that upon further reflection, Larson considered that his giving in, on 7 December 2012, to pressure to tell the judge what he wanted to hear (viz. that those who communicate with felons in violation of their terms of supervised release are at fault for their own incarceration), rather than taking a principled stand similar to the one Oscar Wilde took while being cross-examined in Regina v. Wilde, disqualified him from doing further prisoner solidarity work, as it constituted an unforgivable betrayal of the values of integrity and courage required of such a worker. The caving in to the judge's expectations had been influenced by Larson's mother expressing loneliness at his absence, which put Larson in a position of having to choose between standing for his political beliefs or provoking the court to impose a punishment that would cause his family additional suffering. Since, according to Larson's philosophy, liberty is the highest cause that a person can pursue, only the most honorable individuals are deemed fit for the task; and a dishonorable act of such magnitude, even under duress, results, according to Larson's personal standards, in a lifetime ban from the most sensitive and important libertarian work, viz. that which involves interaction with persons incarcerated for victimless offenses. However, Larson did not deem it to be violation of those standards to continue operating personal blogs such as Nathania.org, since those are one-person operations that do not involve prisoners, and therefore their administration can be considered a position of lesser responsibility.

Since the fight over pedosexuality is still, in the terminology of Harris Mirkin, a Phase I struggle, there seemed to be little to gain, politically, by becoming a martyr, since fellow activists would be unwilling to spread the word of what happened. Furthermore, there was no avoiding some form of defeat, since a severe punishment would have incapacitated Larson from carrying on any activities that cannot be conducted from prison. But this did not constitute an excuse from duty, in Larson's view.

According to this theory, the system is designed to put activists in situations that will essentially induce them to say "Do it to Julia!" and thereby make themselves seem unworthy in their own eyes; but it is still the activist's responsibility to resist succumbing to coercion, regardless of punishment, for the greater good of society. This view holds that allocution is often the activist's one chance to speak in court in defense of his ideas and actions, and the whole nature of the situation is to serve as a test of whether he has enough backbone to rise to the occasion when called upon. Vlad Draconis PenDragon (aka Matthew Mercer-Kinser) compared it to a situation of a homeowner's declining to tell the Gestapo about Jews hiding in his attic, but Larson viewed his statement to the court as more analogous to Erwin Schrödinger's 1938 Confession to the Führer.

Originally, suicide had been considered the best option, since the way in which society is currently set up only gives a person two other options, both of which are problematic. One of those paths is to work within the system, attempting to effect change in ways that don't involve lawbreaking. The other is to rebel in illegal ways. This latter path is the most in accord with the Thoreauvian values set forth in Resistance to Civil Government, but can often result in incarceration, which rapidly grows tiresome. In Larson's view, the suicides of Mohamed Bouazizi and Aaron Swartz had beneficial impacts on public opinion concerning statist tyranny; and further suicides of activists might have the same effect. However, as documented in the bliki, Larson, after making a plan and acquiring the necessary supplies, found himself incapable of going through with it; and unwilling to go back to prison, had to resort back to the path of working within the system.

Within a week of the making of the decision to cut ties with the prisoners, the decision was revoked, and the adding of prisoner-related content resumed. The rationale was that although it had seemed that the focus on activism had been interfering with Inclupedia development, this could be alleviated by devoting the most productive hours of the day to programming, and then using the hours of diminished concentration, motivation and mental acuity for "funner" and less intellectually demanding activities such as activism and writing. However, the decision to discontinue communication with PenDragon stood, the rationale being that it is the responsibility of anarcho-communists, not libertarians, to provide support and assistance to incarcerated anarcho-communists; and that anarcho-communists can get along with one another better than they can get along with libertarians, due to the resentment of anarcho-communists for capitalists.

Controversies concerning the site

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."[13] Abd Lomax replied:[14]

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"[15]

In U.S. federal court

On 6 December 2012, Assistant Federal Public Defender Brooke Sealy Rupert explained the site:[16]

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:[17]

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.'"[18]