While I don't disagree, I feel the first five of these are more explanandum than explanation

2008 financial crisis and poor post-Cold War geopolitics would be my first hypotheses about underlying reasons. Which gets us back to the 1990s...

Incredible. Especially as there is no future tense in English! (There are ways to express the future, of course, but that is not the same as tense.)

Indeed. This is the bot working as it should

So he seems to genuinely not have any intuitive feel of how power works, yet somehow he became PM

I suspect he could only have become PM in the unusual circumstances of recent UK history

For sure. I know from many stories and my own experience how academic job panels have all sorts of inequities and how they are often biased away from simple quality research. I'm just not yet persuaded of what this means for the specific issue of REF portability

But it works the other way too, no? If no portability then universities have to find and recruit people able to deliver. A track record is an asset in that respect

(Not trying to disagree as such! Just trying to see all angles.)

I don't mention this to justify. Just, it's important context

Imo, UK HE governance has been confused for a long time, with many contrary incentives. We don't have a clear vision of what universities are, and what they are for. That is the deep root of the issues

I agree. But worth adding:

- Much of this disinterest is a rational responses to incentives. UK HE VCs are not much rewarded for fostering research qua research

- VCs are right to believe that most academics are replaceable in these terms. There is abundant supply of good candidates

Actually the analogy could go quite deep. The two (or more?) sides are built on fundamentally different philosophical assumptions

Anybody wanting an intro, this is a good place to start:

plato.stanford.edu/entries/ling...

So if you make or imply the assumptions of one side but get a reviewer from the other, all sorts of confusion and misunderstanding can arise

Yeah there is a longstanding civil war in Linguistics, sometimes I think it's kinda like the Korean War. Active combat has largely ceased but no official winner and the two sides now live next door but are developing largely independent of one another

You’re the one assuming it’s a good use of journalist time to check them all. You’re the one with the theory that there’s sufficiently few such documents

And yet you won’t say how many you think there are??

Very relevant study. They use Hillsborough as a natural experiment to show how the decline of The Sun reduced possible support for Brexit on Merseyside

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

That argument is an irony for Orban and his base, who are supporting Russia in this war but who are also still upset about language was used to delimit the new borders of Hungary after WWI

Ah I see, thanks. Ok, gonna read up

I am surely misunderstanding, but don't we already have an electoral system designed for red-blue bloc politics? (Which voters are increasingly not playing ball with.) What alternative systems do you have in mind?

Why is it always Fiske?

I know this is motivated reasoning but still: people are starting to engage more substantively with established theories of grammar. After all, it’s all well and good showing how/that languages evolve, but what does that tell us about language itself?