What is the point of your 7 year old piece? "Lulu wants to rehash old shit" is as close as I can make it.
You don't say. " you suggest that I am not blaming several of the recent and current wars..." - no, I suggest you're a coward who won't address anything reasonably recent and difficult to explain away vs. sucking up to any pro-Soviet/anti-American news source. Sorry for being too subtle for you.

You don't give "personal views" - you give views straight out of the Spartacus Youth League or similarly compromised source. And yes, the article is a piece of shit for the same glaring cherry-picking fact-denying reasons I've trashed dozens of your poorly thought out references. When will you ever step up your game?

[yes, there are good reasons to attack US foreign policy, and intelligent ways to discuss these - you for some reason avoid these in favor of the hackneyed]

So who you gonna believe, the Socialists? or my lying eyes?

The "jerk" notes absolute numbers & graphs in disputing the idea that violence continues unabated. There are no large scale wars in Latin America. There are none in Asia outside of 4 Mideast Muslim countries. There's 1 minor mostly stagnant conflict in Donbas - otherwise nothing in Europe.

Said "academic psychologist" writes stupid shit like " Following the US lead, Europe is moving from “cradle-to-grave nurturance” back to “military prowess”—exactly the opposite direction from the one Pinker believes they have taken." Except that Germany recently had to recuse itself from a ship-building tender because it no longer has the prowess to build state-of-the-art military ships. NATO countries had a moderate role in the Libya attack, and much less in Syria. Western involvement in Ukraine was near nil. Flashpoints like Catalonia and Greece did not descend into military actions. Donbas did not spin out of control; Kiev did not introduce fascist methods; Russia's occupation of Crimea did not lead to full-out war. How much non-violence can we take before we admit that our global diplomacy is trending less violent?

"Pinker provides no evidence that US soldiers don’t refer to Iraqis with derogatory terms, or that civilian atrocities are investigated more aggressively (he never mentions Fallujah or Haditha), or that this “new code of honor” is “indoctrinated,” let alone taken seriously."  Well you can't prove a negative, but again, Petraeus initiated a "hearts-and-minds" tour designed to project soft power. Whether it succeeded or not, the soldiers simply did not run around insulting the locals as policy are unrestrained practice, and the whole effort was predicated on training and letting them relieve us.

"He never mentions Falluah" - let's compare Fallujah (" residents' accusations that the US forces fired indiscriminately at the crowd with no provocation. 17 people were killed " - and a 2nd event where 2 people were killed; 24 civilians were killed in Haditha) with My Lai ( Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were massacred by the U.S. Army soldiers ...Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses."  So a casualty difference of 20:1 or 30:1, combined with a sheer inhumane brutality/atrocity level not present in the Iraqi event, plus My Lai was reputed to be just 1 of many such events. You might note that the greater access of media, the fact that the Mideast wars are in desert rather than covered jungles, and the improved reporting & communications & handheld video have greatly decreased the chance of hiding stuff. Blackwater's killings were fairly quickly posted on the internet, whereas My Lai's killings were hidden for a couple years (with Colin Powell leading the coverup).

But as "the jerk" noted as well, we're 7 years into horrible atrocities of ISIS - beheadings by slow sawing people's heads off, women held as rape concubines, and a variety of other unspeakable events. We've credible reports of Syria & Russian using chemical weapons and heavy munitions on civilians, as well as setting up US planes to bomb a refugee building to create an incident. We have deliberate use of over a million refugees to cause chaos in European countries. But because it's easier to look for the keys under the streetlight, we're going to sit here & re-discuss the Iraq and Syrian conflicts pre-2011, and ignore what's been happening the last 8 years.

So Lulu, whatcha think about Putin using chemical weapons on civilians? Now that the US has backed away from Syria & ISIS-held regions, whatcha think of Syria's continuing military operations? Do you disagree with the contention that still seems to hold that most of the world's current military actions are confined to a few Mideast Muslim countries? Is the US responsible for Saudi Arabia bombing Yemen civilians? (not that supplying weapons doesn't contribute, but the guys actually carrying out the attacks would carry more guilt, no?)

There are several points I agree with and disagree with in the article. Pinker's idea of the "ethical marine warrior" is ridiculous. War is about killing and that brutalizes people. People dehumanize those they have to kill and that they fear might kill them. I've heard border patrol agents talk about "rag heads" crossing the border. I'm sure the soldiers in the ME do the same. That dehumanization inevitably leads to atrocities. We're just as likely to avoid investigating them now as in Viet Nam or earlier. I've seen many articles about the problems of the new system of embedding reporters with military units. The system makes it easier to control reporters access and I think it's likely that there is less reporting of atrocities than in Viet Nam.

There's a lot of bigotry and Islamophobia out there. Liberals don't want to be affiliated with bigots so they often temper legitimate criticism of the Muslim religion to avoid that. Liberals have no trouble criticizing Christianity while defending or ignoring the much more harmful influences of Islam. Your link blames it all on foreign meddling in ME affairs when I think fundamentalist Islam is at least as large a problem.

Pinker exaggerates the changes in the last 100 years while your link ignores the changes that have occurred over centuries. Just a few thoughts on the article. I've never read an article I've agreed or disagreed with 100%. But I do think this one makes many very good points.