Pacifism, Anarchism and Pith & Substance

Having been recently accused of pacifism and having only partly denied it, I think it is time to unveil Pith & Substance's overall political philosophy of presumptive anarcho-pacifism (or PAP, for short).

Lawyers are big on burdens of proof, and shifting them, so the reader will forgive me if I employ that kind of talk.

Basically, the philsophy is that, absent some good reason to the contrary, pacifists and anarchists are right. Unlike those proposing war and state action, they don't need to have good arguments (which is a good thing, because they are mostly too stoned to come up with any).

Unlike an AP, a PAP recognizes that sometimes (the exceptional time), the call for war or state action is correct. Taxes may be levied, regulations passed, even wars started. But a PAPpy is always suspicious of the reasons given, and never pretends to be symmetrically suspicious of not regulating, not taxing or not blowing things up. Naturally, the call for domestic democratically-acceptable state action faces a less severe normative hurdle than bombing foreigners.

PAPists have been known to invoke the subsidiarity and just war traditions in support of their presumptions.