Liam McHugh-Russell
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Liam McHugh-Russell
@xntl.info
2.5K followers 1.6K following 2.9K posts
Canadian law professor. Transnational law, labour regulation, cooperatives and corporate governance, knowledge politics. Currently obsessed with the uses of legal scholarship. Two time dad. Not even a jack of any trades.
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xntl.info
While there is so much that is disturbing about this case study in the destruction of academic freedom, one high point is the refusal of the targeted professor to submit
Dear Dr. Sweet, I hereby submit my S 2026 syllabus for PHIL 111, Contemporary Moral Issues, for mandatory censorship review. The syllabus has not changed much since I last taught the course. I have made some minor adjustments to the module on Race and Gender Ideology and to the lecture on Sexual Morality. These topics are commonly covered in this type of course nationwide, and the material is discussed in depth in the assigned textbook (Fiala and MacKinnon, 10th edition). I also ask my students to read a few passages from Plato (Aristophanes' myth of the split humans and Diotima's Ladder of Love). Please note that my course does not "advocate" any ideology; I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues. If you interpret System Rule 08.01 §2.1(b) as prohibiting these topics, I would like to remind you that the U.S. Constitution protects my course content. Texas A&M is a public institution bound by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has noted that academic freedom is "a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom" (Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 [1967]). Another relevant precedent is Sweezy v. New Hampshire. Here is Chief Justice Earl Warren for the majority in 1957: "The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and stu
January 7, 2026 at 11:32 AM
xntl.info
This worked for me:

Time & Language > Typing > Advanced Keyboard Settings; Click "Input language hot keys"; Click "Change Key Sequence"

I can now change to US (International) and back using Ctrl-Shift
Screen shot of Windows 11 settings Menu for Time & Language > Typing > Advanced keyboard settings Screenshot of Windows 11 settings dialog entitled "Text Services and Input Language" Windows 11 settings dialog entitled Change key sequence
November 27, 2025 at 11:53 AM
xntl.info
How it's going / how it's going
A picture of a woman above a news story that reads "Willing states must act to save international legal order, warns top academic" A news headline below a picture of Anita Anand. Headline reads "Up to the U.S. to decide if it violated international law with Caribbean boat strikes, says Anand Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand broke with tradition as she seemingly asserted that Canada's top diplomat doesn't weigh in on a foreign country's adherence to international law."
November 13, 2025 at 11:43 AM
xntl.info
There is much in the data being requested by the committee that I think should be provided *in some form*. What I find most troubling is the demand for disagreggated, i.e. individualized data about both applicants and reviewers. Putting all this data into an excel sheet is a privacy nightmare 2/5
That the three federal granting agencies transmit to it the disaggregated data of all applications submitted, whether funded or unfunded, for all students and professor funding programs from the master’s level for applications made between 2000 and 2025. That this data includes (1) demographic data of applicants and collaborators, including applicants’ responses to the equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) questionnaire, (2) the institutions and departments of applicants, including the institutions of collaboration, (3) the language of the application, (4) all data regarding the type of application and project content (application year, grant program, discipline, title, summary, amount requested by the applicant), as well as (5) the identity of the evaluation committee, comments, opinions, scores assigned to applications for each criterion, and (6) the outcome of the application and the amount awarded.
November 3, 2025 at 12:49 PM
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October 31, 2025 at 12:07 PM
xntl.info
Man this game does not pull its punches
"When the dust settled, the liberals were the only ones left to clean up the mess. By virtue of their survival they were handed enormous power to shape the future." She turns her gaze to the delta. "This was all our last generation managed."
October 29, 2025 at 12:29 AM
xntl.info
As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M—C—M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.
October 28, 2025 at 11:19 AM
xntl.info
Meme of drowing hand given a high five then sinking beneath the waves
October 24, 2025 at 2:20 PM
xntl.info
Good time to read Fanon, and Césaire for that matter
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind-it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.
October 20, 2025 at 2:36 PM
xntl.info
A not-very-happy Friday thought for all my legal academic peeps
No one writes a law review article where the end line reads: "Well, in conclusion, it seems like we're all pretty much screwed." That simply doesn't happen. Which means-and this is important-that if ever we were screwed, you wouldn't hear about it in a law review article. Ever. In fact, the more thoroughly and intensely screwed we are, the less likely you would be to hear about it in a law review article.
October 17, 2025 at 12:45 PM
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I agree that this is one important thing novels and other forms of writing do, but I've come around to Ursula Le Guin's view that long form writing *does things to readers,* that the point of the book is what it does, and what a good book does can't be expressed in terms of what it says
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. A metaphor for what? If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.
October 13, 2025 at 9:29 PM
xntl.info
Man Adorno really knew what was up with fascists, huh
"According to their own constitution, the he-men would thus be what they are usually presented as in film scripts, masochists."
Tough baby [in English in original] – A certain gesture of manliness, be it one’s own, be it that of another, deserves mistrust. It expresses independence, surety of the power of command, the silent conspiracy of all men with each other. Earlier one anxiously called it, awe-struck, the whims of lords, today it is democratized and is played by film heroes for the benefit of the lowliest bank employee. The archetype for this is the good looking man in a smoking jacket, who enters his bachelor’s pad alone one late evening, turns on the indirect lighting, and pours a whisky-soda: the carefully recorded fizzing of the mineral water says what the arrogant mouth does not; that he despises whatever does not smell of smoke, leather and shaving cream – above all, women, and for that very reason they swarm all over him. For him, the pinnacle of human relations is the club, the site of a respect founded on a considerate inconsiderateness. The joys of such men, or on the contrary of their models, which hardly anyone alive really matches, for human beings are always better than their culture, have altogether something of the latent act of violence. By all appearances, this is threatened to others, though he has long since had no need to do so, sprawled on his easy chair. In truth it is past violence against himself. If all pleasure sublates earlier displeasure [Unlust], then here displeasure is raised – as pride in bearing it – unmediated, untransformed here displeasure is raised – as pride in bearing it – unmediated, untransformed, stereotypically into pleasure: unlike wine, every glass of whiskey, every puff on the cigar still recalls the reluctance, which it must have cost the organism, to accustom itself to such powerful stimuli. According to their own constitution, the he-men would thus be what they are usually presented as in film scripts, masochists. The lie is concealed in their sadism, and it is as liars that they truly become sadists, agents of repression. That lie is nothing other than repressed homosexuality, which emerges as the only approved form of what is heterosexual. In Oxford one can differentiate between two kinds of students: the “tough guys” [in English in original] and the intellectuals; the latter are equated almost without further ado to those who are effeminate. There is a great deal of evidence that the ruling class polarizes itself according to these extremes on the road to dictatorship. Such disintegration is the secret of integration, of happiness of unity in the absence of happiness. In the end the “tough guys” [in English in original] are the ones who are really effeminate, who require the weaklings as their victims, in order not to admit that they are like them. Totality and homosexuality belong together. While the subject falls apart, it negates everything which is not of its own kind. The opposites of the strong man and the compliant youth fuse into a social order, opposites of the strong man and the compliant youth fuse into a social order, which unreservedly asserts the masculine principle of domination. By making everyone, without exception – even presumed subjects – into its objects, it recoils into total passivity, virtually into what is feminine.
October 9, 2025 at 11:10 AM
xntl.info
Yeah, amid all the buffoonery and over the top violence, this is the real heart of One Battle After Another
Here, we see ordinary working people just trying to live in peace in a country where armed forces of the state intend violence upon them. Resistance, for them, is not an aesthetic posture or a thrill ride or a rejection of stifling social norms, but a matter of basic survival, and it relies on coordination, trust, and secret procedures designed to keep everyone safe. Most people, after all, aren’t looking to kill or be killed; most people just want to know how to build communities that can defend themselves.
October 8, 2025 at 12:30 PM
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On some level 28 Years Later may be dumb. But my god 10 minutes in and the profound care that has been taken with tone, angle, editing it's... well it's not like anything else. Honestly there is a poetry to it that channels Malick.
Feet in an outdoor shower next to a sign that says "Don't take too long. Thank you!
October 4, 2025 at 1:38 AM
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Strong evidence that there is also a Royest Thompson
September 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
xntl.info
Okay, this one made me laugh out loud. He seems so profoundly unserious. Chotiner keeps asking "how do sleep at night" and Sunstein basically gives the law professor's "that's interesting! On the one hand..."
You can defer to her. I was just asking because you put it in the first sentence.
September 23, 2025 at 5:41 PM
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Do people still actually believe this about Thomas?! That Alito is an "extremely careful lawyer?"
Wow. I would just say that I find it very hard to believe, especially with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who seem to me to be kind of out-and-out partisan Trump supporters. This is completely fair to question. Alito is an extremely careful lawyer and a very precise judge. He is clearly taken with a certain view of our culture that is shared by many of Trump’s supporters. But is it possible to find an opinion in which he says, I’m going to go this way because the President is the law, or anything that verges on that? I think that’s very hard to find. Is there anything in his opinions that shows disrespect for freedom of speech or freedom of religion? I think that’s impossible to find. Thomas is an originalist. He’s the most committed originalist on the Court, who believes the Constitution should be
September 23, 2025 at 5:37 PM
xntl.info
China now produces 2.5 times the electricity produced by the United States. They contribute fully 1/3 of global electricity production.
Chart showing electricity generation over time. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?tab=line&country=SWE~IND~USA~GBR~FRA~CHN
September 22, 2025 at 10:24 AM
xntl.info
It's easy to miss given the collapse of the US, but this basic data from @adamtooze.bsky.social, on China's solar growth, would on its own signal a change in the global geographies of power.
China’s new-build solar additions in the last six months are more than the US has installed in total: China Flow > US stock. Germany was once the global champion of solar. China’s new additions in six months are two times Germany’s installed capacity. In the first half of 2025 China’s new additions were more than twice the new capacity installed by the entire rest of the world this year. The #2 on the list, India, installed 24GW. The US at #3 installed 21GW. There is an order of magnitude difference.
September 22, 2025 at 10:24 AM
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Here's the tl;dr of my post from today. It...does not look for the Dalhousie board. In other news, boy am I ready to go back to work
How does the university decide how to allocate its non-endowment investment income? Is there an accounting rule or other policy dictating how that income is to be allocated? If the amount of investment income being allocated to the capital fund is more or less up to the discretion of the board, how much investment income is the university planning to allocate to the capital fund next year? Or over the next three years? Notably, $14.5 million per year looks pretty similar to the annual $17 million hole in revenue that is the starting point for the board’s operational budget plan for the next three years. If the board made a strategic decision that it was necessary, rational or otherwise in the best interests of the university to spend half of the $70 million in financial windfalls earned over the last three years on capital improvements, on what basis was it decided that this capital spending would be accounted for as investment income earned and spent within the capital budget, rather than as investment income earned in operations and then transferred to the capital budget? Unless there is a good reason, the only conclusion I can imagine is that the board wanted to hide this income during budget consultations and mislead the university community about the actual amount and allocation of revenues available for operations rather than be open about the need for these investments
September 15, 2025 at 3:13 PM
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As I read the act, it requires ten years "in practice." But maybe the jurisprudence or practice is clear that this means practice as a member of the Barreau.
September 15, 2025 at 10:44 AM
xntl.info
A fantastic essay on the reality of working as a flight attendant for Air Canada.
What this doesn't address is the larger issue, which is that unpaid work is a problem that's common in many female-dominated industries- in many so-called "pink collar" industries, like child care, home support work and nursing. All of these are industries where labour often goes under compensated, and unappreciated. It's work that's critical to our society at large, but devalued *because* it's performed by women.
August 22, 2025 at 2:39 PM
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Notably, while the government keeps cutting direct funding, it has prevented the university from raising tuition in line with inflation by putting place caps well below inflation. And the province has frozen tuition rates (for local students) for 2025-26

#DalStrike
Graph showing tuition rates were essentially flat in real terms at Nova Scotia Universities between 2006 and 2021 https://higheredstrategy.com/nova-scotia-in-a-nutshell/
August 20, 2025 at 6:11 PM
xntl.info
Okay, so provincial grants haven't kept up with costs, but can the province afford to pay more? Yes! Nova Scotia's *real* GDP (i.e. after accounting for inflation) grew by about 20% between 2014 and 2024
Chart showing real GDP for Nova Scotia, indexed to 2019. Value for 2013 is 90. Value for 2023 is about 108 from here https://novascotia.ca/finance/statistics/archive_news.asp?id=20423&dg=,2&df=&dto=,1a&dti=36
August 20, 2025 at 6:11 PM
xntl.info
The change in provincial funding to Dalhousie between 2014 and 2024 is a nominal increase of about 9% but in a drop of about 15% in real terms. To keep up with inflation, the grant today would have to $240 million, not $203.
CPI calculator showing that $186 million in 2014 is equivalent to $239 million in 2024. From https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculator/
August 20, 2025 at 6:11 PM