I know it when I see it.

I've just signed an online petition to protest at Sarkozy, Berlusconi and Harper's reneging on their promise to raise development funds to 0.7% of total revenue. Unbelievably, these sleazeballs think that tithing 0.7% is too much! A tithe was originally a tenth of your income, so that isn't even a tithe of a tithe. OK, they also have their own poor to think of, the kind who are not just always with us but also turning up at polling stations. But there's poor as in Canadian poor and poor as in Somali poor, and that's a hell of a difference.

There is a wide range of opinion on how much of your resources should be devoted to helping others, from Jesus, who said you should sell everything you have and give the money to the poor, through Cicero, who had a sliding scale ending with "strangers" (i.e. not fellow Romans) whose only claim was to resources that were in effect free (e.g. water from your well) to the kind of reptilian libertarians who protest loudly that we have no obligations to our fellow humans unless we've signed a written contract. So how do we say that 0.7% is stingy? Beats me, but as Justice Potter Stewart notoriously said of obscenity, I know it when I see it.