‘Invite’ as a noun

I have seen an increasing use of the word ‘invite’ to replace ‘invitation’. The distinction between the two words seemed pretty clear to me. One invites someone by sending them an invitation. And yet the latter word seems to be disappearing, with the former taking its place, with people saying things like “Hope you got my invite” and “The invites have gone out”.

I find this use jarring. I thought that it was simply wrong but on checking the Oxford English Dictionary it appears that the word invite can be used as a noun this way and has been thus used since the 17th century.

Was this usage common and I just did not notice it until recently or did it fall out of favor and is now coming back?

Can you be good without god?

Yes.

It is a simple answer to a simple question. It should be quite self-evident to anyone. And yet, religious people manage to get some atheists to actually debate it. P. Z. Myers has posted all the YouTube links to a recent debate between Sam Harris and theologian William Lane Craig on the topic “Does Good Come From God?” I watched about half of it and although it was mildly interesting, I tuned out because I have little patience for discussions based on unexamined and unsubstantiated premises.

Craig was trying to make the case that without a god, there can be no objective morality or standards for what is good. My response to that argument is “So what?” What makes people think that the universe ought to have objective morality? All these discussions about how there must be a god because without a god people would go berserk and murder everyone else and life would be awful and not worth living seems to me to be missing the point. We cannot will god into existence just because we can’t bear the thought of life without god.

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A little puzzle

Some organizations that request money or information often include return self-addressed envelopes. This is convenient. What I don’t understand is why a few of them also include their own address again in the top left corner, where, as the sender, you would normally insert your own name and address. What is the point in the organization’s address being in both sender’s and recipient’s locations on the envelope?

The only reason that I can come up with is that if you forget to put postage on a letter, it is sent back to the presumed sender at the address on the top left. Is this a ploy to fool the postal service so that the letter reaches them whether there is postage or not? Surely they must be wise to that trick?

What does the postal service do with letters that do not have adequate postage but where the sender’s and recipient’s names and addresses are the same?

Know when to fold ’em

Commenter Peter alerted me to a story on This American Life about a gung-ho evangelical who went through the process that I have described before, where he goes to seminary and on learning Biblical history and scholarship becomes an atheist.

Filled with all the new information he now has as to why Christianity is false, he becomes zealous for atheism and tries to convert his family members, before he realizes that people join religious groups for a lot of benefits that have little to do with belief in god and that sometimes, on a personal level in the private sphere, it may be better to leave them alone.

The story starts at the 8:20 minute mark and goes until the 20:00 mark.

The menace of surprise parties

It’s been awhile since I let loose one of my rants about something trivial that yet bugs me, so here’s one.

I hate surprise parties.

I must admit that the appeal of surprise parties completely eludes me and I am getting to dislike them even more as I get older. Maybe it is because they are an acquired taste and since they were unheard of in Sri Lanka when I was growing up (at least I don’t recall ever hearing about one, let alone attending any), I just didn’t learn to like them. And yet in the US people seem to really like them.

The whole thing about sneaking in early and then hiding and waiting until the guest of honor arrives and then jumping out and shouting in unison “surprise!” strikes me as childish.
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Glass houses and stones

I was wondering how long it would be before some country that is lectured on human rights by the US government would turn around and hurl its own abuses back at it. It would have to be a country that was independent enough of US influence. Well, it looks like China has taken the lead, in response to Hillary Clinton’s criticism of human rights in China.

According to Reuter’s “The United States is beset by violence, racism and torture and has no authority to condemn other governments’ human rights problems, China said on Sunday, countering U.S. criticism of Beijing’s crackdown.” China also said that the US’s advocacy of free information flow was contradicted by its efforts to shut down WikiLeaks.

Now that China has said it, how long before other countries justify their own abuses in a similar fashion? When one country denies human rights to people, it starts a downward spiral in which other countries justify their own abuses by saying “Why pick on us when they do it?”

Pressure builds on Obama over treatment of Bradley Manning

A long list of law academics, some of whom have been considered supporters of president Obama, have signed a letter strongly protesting the cruel treatment of Bradley Manning.

The existence of this letter was reported in the London Guardian:

The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America’s foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Tribe joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago.

He told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to have been treated in a way that “is not only shameful but unconstitutional” as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base in Virginia.
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The intervention of Tribe and hundreds of other legal scholars is a huge embarrassment to Obama, who was a professor of constitutional law in Chicago. Obama made respect for the rule of law a cornerstone of his administration, promising when he first entered the White House in 2009 to end the excesses of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

I hope US news outlets pick up on this and publicize it widely.

How civilians get killed

We frequently get reports of how civilians, including women and children, get killed in air strikes by drones and other military aircraft. But why does this keep happening, when the technology is now supposed to be so advanced that people can be identified at long range? Surely you should be able to at least be able to make out children to alert you that you are not engaging fighters?

This article, based on military documents and transcripts of cockpit and radio conversations obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, describes in detail how one such tragedy came about. It shows the power of confirmation bias, how when you are determinedly looking for something, you interpret events as supporting your beliefs even if they do not.