NASCAR announced this week that Truck Series driver Daniel Dye has been suspended indefinitely in response to “homophobic comments” made by Dye on that cretinous live stream above. Dye has also been suspended by his team, Ram Trucks factory partner Kaulig Racing.

Both suspensions are wildly excessive reactions to dumb banter that was not “homophobic” but rather simple, juvenile foolishness. Race car drivers tend not to be deft wits. “He plays for the the team” is at worst Seinfeld-speak for “he’s gay,” and if there’s nothing wrong with being gay, then saying someone is gay isn’t homophobic. As for Dye’s pathetic attempt at a “gay voice,” his version isn’t within a mile of a gay voice, and I know gay voices.

When someone has affected an ostentatiously stereotypically gay manner of communicating, they should be no more immune from impressions or parody than Jack Nicholson (whom Tom Cruise imitates in “A Few Good Men”), James Cagney (Frank Gorshin’s specialty) John Wayne or Johnny Carson (both mastered by Rich Little). For that matter, those political correctness warriors who are offended by various riffs on foreign accents, the realm of Sasha Baron Cohen and Danny Kaye, among others, can bite me.

I have no clue how David Malukas really sounds, but if you want to know what a “gay voice” is like, here’s Sirius/XM’s Seth Rudetsky talking the way he does on his various shows, doing his best to make sure no “cis” males come within ten miles of a musical theater production. Seth is a (talented) performer, and he can “butch up” when he chooses, but here is how he normally talks—his insufferable interviewer finally lets him get a word in edgewise about two and half minutes into the video:

Seth makes Nathan Lane in “The Bird Cage” seem like Hulk Hogan.

…specially regarding so-called “Islamophobia” and the Iran War?

But they aren’t, are they?

Here is Melanie Phillips on Sky News:

By purest coincidence, the latest post from “Holly Mathnerd,” an eccentric but often perceptive substacker, raised the exact issue I was attempting to get at in yesterday’s ethics quiz. Apparently not too successfully: a lot of commenters seem to think that wasting money in the eyes of others is indistinguishable from wasting life, which is the primary issue I was trying to raise.

I realized a bit late in the erratic discussion that my ethics alarms triggered by a woman spending 70 days counting out loud are the same ones that ring over Americans taking themselves out of productive and collaborative society by using “recreational” drugs. If you live in a society, you have an obligation to participate in it, and as helpfully and productively as possible. Making oneself stupid by self-medicating isn’t doing that, and neither is counting out loud for 70 days.

Holly focused on the wasting life problem. She writes,

“Memento mori,” the Stoics taught us. Remember that you are going to die.

The idea is that keeping death in your peripheral vision — not obsessing over it, just refusing to pretend it isn’t there — the pretense most of us perform constantly and effortlessly — makes you live better. More deliberately. With less of your finite time squandered on things that don’t matter.”

Of course, the next challenge is how one defines “don’t matter.” If it matters to you, doesn’t that mean it “matters”? Or is there a useful, objective definition of “matters” that can distinguish between wasting life and truly using a life to its fullest extent? “Life is a banquet,” Auntie Mame memorably says in the novel, play, musical, movie and movie musical, “and most poor bastards are starving to death!” Her point was that there is no excuse for wasting a life.

Isn’t that a life competence lesson? Isn’t life competence an ethical value?

As many predicted and others dreaded, the Academy Awards last night did it: they anointed the pro-domestic terrorism, anti-American, Hollywood woke fever dream “One Battle After Another” with the Best Movie award. Starring the usual far-left suspects Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, the film is deliberately offensive to anyone who wasn’t convinced that Kamala Harris was a wonderful Presidential candidate; I made the mistake of starting to watch it and “walked out” (that is, changed channels to a “Chicago Med” re-run) after about 20 excruciating minutes. “The Critical Drinker’s” review above registered as fair and accurate based on what I saw: a well-acted, well-produced piece of political propaganda.

You know, like “Triumph of the Will.”

The fact that it was nominated told me what the annual awards broadcast would be like and that Hollywood is determined to alienate at least half the country. Good plan. If I had been producing the show, I would have told all participants that political grandstanding was strictly forbidden and that anyone who started blathering about Trump, trans activism, I.C.E. or “illegal wars” would have a trap door open under them like they used to have on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.”

But no, there were the predictable rants by narrow-view artists trying to suck up to future employers in their bubble. Even Conan O’Brien succumbed to the suck-up vibe, though he was obviously chosen as M.C. because he harkens back to the days when late night hosts mocked all parties and not just Republicans, and the producers wanted to trick Americans tired of being called racists and fascists into tuning in. And a trick it was.

Good for Quentin.

Arquette, once considered a rising superstar in her “Desperately Seeking Susan” days, took a swipe at the director in a recent interview, saying of his “Pulp Fiction,” in which she had a memorable scene,

“It’s iconic, a great film on a lot of levels. But personally I am over the use of the N-word…I hate it. I cannot stand that he [Tarantino] has been given a hall pass. It’s not art, it’s just racist and creepy.”

Tarantino replied with the “X” message above, and appropriately so. Among the legitimate ethics complaints against Arquette, perhaps the least is her breach of a duty to support fellow artists in their perilous and capricious profession. On the other hand,

• She is disloyal and ungrateful. Her career was already on the wane when Tarantino cast her in “Pulp Fiction.” It was a gift. For her to gratuitously criticize him now is revolting.
• Her blatant virtue-signalling to Hollywood’s Woke World is transparent, self-serving, and desperate. “Oooh, Rosanna Arquette is knocking Quentin Tarantino! Wait, who is she again?”
• Arquette’s  contention is idiotic. “Nigger” is just another word, and like all words, a legitimate tool in pursuit of character, nuance, plot, shock, surprise and humor. She’s “over it”? Swell, she doesn’t have to use it. I dare her to take a stand if she finally gets another chance at a major role and the word is contained in her dialogue. I double-dare her.
• Of course she’s looking for headlines, social media controversy and renewed relevance, and throwing Tarantino under the metaphorical bus for her own gain. A Kantian violation at best. 
• Accusing anyone in show business, that most stultifying of partisan bubbles, of “racism” is deliberately trying to inflict harm, endangering a career, income stream, popularity and reputatation.

I have sympathy for Rosanna Archette. She must feel like Moonlight Graham—“We just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days.’ I didn’t realize that that was the only day.”.She was ready to be a star, but from a combination of bad luck and bad management, she missed her moment. Her less attractive younger sister became a bigger star. Her one-trick pony of a brother had a major role in a popular horror franchise, the “Scream” films. Even her grandfather Cliff, who was a staple on “The Hollywood Squares,” had a better career.

And her reaction to her own failure and disappointment is to take a shot at Quentin Tarantino? How sad. This is a business that creates monsters.

A long-time friend, part of a retired two-lawyer couple, just posted a furious anti-Trump rant on Facebook because “Trump’s” war on Iran has interfered with their planned three-week luxury cruise. “The mid-terms can’t come soon enough!” she concludes.

Naturally, no one is pointing out in the comments the warped values and priorities such a post conveys. The outburst also shows how confident bubble-dwellers on social media become that their world-view is the only one decent, intelligent and respectable American could possible adhere to.