I for one am pleased that Bricker’s challenge was met by other posters who felt the question was reasonable enough to respond to with the FACTS. Furthermore his challenge was germaine to the thread wheras your complaint his simply a nitpicky hijack to run down a political oponent.
Maybe they wanted to ascertain that he himself was not a robber. Professional courtesy have something about the number of robbers allowed to rob within some minimum distance of each other.
After all, we have to exhaust all possibilities before we consider the simplest and most obvious answers. :dubious:
If someone really wants to gaybash, presumably they will go to a place with a bunch of gay men, no? Irony requires that a situation somehow necessarily contains an opposite expectation. Is there anything about a gay bar that makes you expect that homophobes wouldn’t target gay men there? To recycle the analogy I used upthread and you presumably missed, would you think it was ironic if I hated gymnasts and went to the Summer Olympics to beat one up?
It’s out of print, but if you can dig up a copy at your local library or through an interlibrary loan, I highly recommend *The Compass of Irony *by D.C. Muecke. (You could also try to buy a copy online, but I think a friend got me the last reasonably priced one about five years ago–these days they’re all running $100 to $200 or more.) It should help you figure out exactly what irony is, since you’re apparently having problems parsing a more concise dictionary definition.
Here are some other things that are not ironic:
10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife
A free ride when you’ve already paid
Rain on your wedding day
I used the word “irony” because you would think the one place a gay person could be safe would be a gay bar. Particularly a gay bar as famous as the Stonewall Inn.
This argument kind of makes it impossible to ironically gay-bash anywhere. If it’s not ironic when you do it at a gay bar, and it’s not ironic if you do it at a gay-bashing convention, and presumably it isn’t ironic when done someplace unrelated to gays or bashing, what is the gay-basher in search of an ironic location to do?* Why do you hate gay-bashers?
Matthew Shepard wasn’t killed at a gay bar. In fact, I would imagine that anti-gay violence at gay-friendly establishments is far less common than anti-gay violence elsewhere.
In this particular case, I don’t see anything wrong with the OP’s use of the term ironic.
*Please don’t say “wear a rainbow John Deere hat”.
I’d think it was silly - since you’d be up to your arse in more gymnasts than you could handle, plus their trainers, minders, fans, and general law enforcement. Better to see if you could find one not it its natural habitat, as 'twere, with no-one but itself to look after its welfare.
Similarly, if you want to Paki-bash, you don’t go to your local mosque and stir up more shit than you can handle; you see if you can catch one wandering into mainly white territory (or black territory; anecdotal evidence has it that ethnic minorities don’t necessarily like each other any more than white folks do) by himself.
And so similarly, you figure a gay guy in a gay bar, probably surrounded by a horde of other gays, some of whom may be pretty muscly guys and in any case have numbers on their side, is in about the safest place he’s going to be unless an even bigger horde of homophobes come around mob-handed. That’s not out of the question, sad to say, but wasn’t the case under discussion.
Conclusion: No-one missed your analogy, but it didn’t do the job it was meant to.
Why do you think the universe demands that there *must *be such a thing as a gaybashing that is ironic because of its location?
A gaybashing that takes place at a prominent gay bar is disappointing, but it’s not ironic.
Homophobes aren’t noted for their devotion to logic.
This is a rather naive assumption.