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?