It was easy to agree with in a general sort of way. His philosophical advice, taken out of context, is certainly sound.

His moral advice was a bit weaker, as the words "love" and "hate" just sort of float around out there. Loving your children is fine, but what about loving your enemies? Christianity teaches that we should hate the sin, but love the sinner. That kind of a moral blank check just lets people get away with murder. And there is the very broad middle between those two extremes. You can like someone but not like everything they do.

But, again, his philosophical advice was unarguable. For more of the same, YouTube offered me similar sentiments by Noam Chomsky. He had a nice little speech about the elite schools teaching young people conformity to stupid ideas.

Neither Bertrand Russell nor Noam Chomsky was a friend of freedom. Ultimately, their fine words to the contrary, they were enemies of objectivity.

Sure, when you contrast them with the hard-core irrationalists, the existentialist, postmodernists and such, they stand up well enough... until you examine their ideas and see the flaws that betray reason and the commitment to reality.

By comparison, I have written about the good work done by Alan Sokol. But Sokol does not like being called a "Marxist" or even a "Leftist" as both terms have been co-opted to mean things that he does not endorse. But he is that, and not an advocate of objectivity, or of he economic freedom that derives from it.

That is why Ayn Rand's writings are so powerful. She integrated metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics along with economics and aesthetics. Those all are parts of the same ultimate truth, just as geometry, algebra, arithmetic, and topology must be as true as chemistry, biology, and physics. Reality is real. A is A.