Such generalisations are invidious.
Brown, who was under some pressure anyway at the start of his second season since succeeding Ashley Giles at Edgbaston, was left in an invidious position as Warwickshire accommodated Jonathan Trott's wishes to come straight back to first-class cricket, four months after his abrupt departure from England's Ashes tour.
So that would mean trusting some countries and not others, I suggest: an invidious choice for a court to make.
And, lest I forget, or anyone else forgets, the only reason Sabey is in this invidious position is because the evidence against him was handed to the police by his employers, Rupert's Murdoch's News Corporation.
Given a history in which invidious distinctions were used as instruments of oppression, it is natural to ask whether an exhibition defined by race just perpetuates an outmoded way of thinking.
In particular, the attitudes of boys to girls and girls to their own bodies: Page 3 supplies invidious comparators and narrow, retrograde stereotypes.The paper itself seems to understand that tits are not for kids, and drops them in its family-friendly weekend editions.
In 1899 Thorstein Veblen, an economist, described the economic necessity of efficient leisure to a society where conspicuous consumption, leisure, and other "emulative or invidious comparisons" had replaced hereditary emblems of status.
But if the voluntary approach is ineffective, compulsion is an invidious alternative.
"Being both a principal and an agent is mutually reinforcing," he says.Perhaps, but these days making a fortune can be as invidious as losing one.
As Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution writes, "Whatever our sprawling suburbia's multiple shortcomings, weighing them requires a reality test, not an invidious comparison with Utopia .America's demographic challenge provides that test.
As with NATO's enlargement, this will involve invidious choices.
