Seavey vs. Rand Video Redux

Even though this “Month of Ayn Rand” I declared saw me reading a Rand speech at Yale and mentioning her frequently (though not in as much depth as I’d planned) on this blog, it’s worth mentioning again that I’m not an Objectivist.  Indeed, as I noted last month, in this clip, at the four-minute mark, I ask Ayn Rand Institute head Yaron Brook if we really want more selfishness and can plausibly call the motivations of burglars and labor unions “altruistic” in anything other than a sense so linguistically idiosyncratic as to be obfuscatory.

I asked in my capacity as a four-time Stossel audience member, almost as prestigious an honor as multiple Oscars.  I also attended a taping about healthcare and one about food at which I actually made a comment in defense of Twinkie-eating, but the only time I spoke and made it into the final edit besides the Rand clip was my before-and-after double-comment the night of Obama’s State of the Union, with the URL of this very blog flashed under my talking head — ah, multimedia.  I can’t find my Obama-mocking comments online, but you can at least glimpse my head as Cato’s David Boaz starts talking in this clip from that same broadcast.

One day soon, I should really upgrade all my (notoriously limited) electronic media capacity so that I can easily do things like transfer my SOTU comments from DVD and/or VHS to online — and in general make fuller use of the mighty media power of Fox Business Network.

Face-to-face is good, too, of course (thus things like our impending religion debate at Lolita Bar between Richard Spencer and Helen Rittelmeyer), and the three nights in the middle of last week saw me at social/networking events run, respectively, by a Randian, a group of skeptics, and Institute for Humane Studies libertarians — the third at religious King’s College in the basement of the Empire State Building, presumably taking its name from the powerful being above us who always goes through one’s mind in that location, King Kong.

And on that note, I will turn my attention for most of the coming week of blog entries to movies, just in time for the Oscars.  Rand loved Hollywood and would no doubt have approved.