I misread it as Satan Island, and figured it made a lot of sense. Maybe a dyslexic bought the land online.

Because even when you are an earthly channel for divine love manifesting perfect peace, it's really hard to live without good bagels.

Joke aside, they sound like very, very odious people.

Heh. Miko, I'll assume you've been to Staten Island. This is like forming a commune in fucking Paramus. It's the type of place people form communes to get away from.

I know, I have been, that's why the joke. Attempt at joke, maybe.

And it really is hard to live without the bagels. A sacrifice not to be minimized!.

Joking aside, I think there are some quite different conceptions of what a commune is or should be depending on where they are and who joins them. Most communes are not really "peace out, bro" hippie retreats -- the successful and long-lived ones, anyway.

The recent obit for Kat Kinkade, founder of the Virginia commune Twin Oaks, speaks of the tensions between idealists and pragmatists that bedevil many intentional communities. Some urban communes have failed the test and either collapsed outright or evolved into something more like cohousing (aka "commune lite").

GANAS says right on its front page that many of its members are professionals who work in Manhattan. For them obviously it's a shot at the best of both worlds.

Oh, come on. The whole best of both worlds part is what makes it sound like a pretty good idea, at least on paper. City folks have a much smaller environmental footprint than rural folks anyway.

Is Staten Island really that bad? Seemed like any other piece of suburbia speckled with good and bad neighborhoods to me, but at least the mass transit is pretty good. Who cares if your neighbors are a bunch of "guidos and blonds" if you've got your cult to hang with when you get home?

Is is really so hard to make an intentional community without running up against that "Hell is other people" problem? And the invasive super truth "feedback learning" shit? And the slacker hippies? THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.