#defeat — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Bytes Europe @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 22:12 UTC

All Blacks player ratings: How the New Zealand players rated in Soweto defeat https://www.byteseu.com/2340072/ #2924 #all #best #blacks #defeat #from #how #in #limm #Loss #NATHAN #new #NewZealand #performers #player #players #rated #rates #ratings #soweto #Springboks #the #worst #zealand

#zealand #worst #the #springboks #soweto #ratings

Africa @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 21:53 UTC

https://www.europesays.com/africa/412363/ All Blacks v Springboks: World media reacts to South Africa’s late surge to victory #2924 #Africa #Africa’s #All #blacks #defeat #Here’s #Johannesburg #late #media #reacted #reacts #south #Springboks #surge #test #third #to #Victory #world

#world #victory #to #third #test #surge

Miss Kitty 🌈🌈🌈 @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 10:49 UTC

This is important because you have to understand how to #defeat your #enemy. If you don't #need what he needs, you can give him the slip. #Grift depends upon need. I can't tell you all the changes you need to make. #America as a whole has to become #honest and #humble. That #prescription is obvious.

#prescription #humble #honest #america #grift #need

Miss Kitty 🌈🌈🌈 @[email protected] · 2026-09-05 · 10:49 UTC

This is important because you have to understand how to #defeat your #enemy. If you don't #need what he needs, you can give him the slip. #Grift depends upon need. I can't tell you all the changes you need to make. #America as a whole has to become #honest and #humble. That #prescription is obvious.

#defeat #enemy #need #grift #america #honest

Félicien Breton 🍉 🔻 🌱 @[email protected] · 2026-07-23 · 18:50 UTC

Who actually controls the Strait of Hormuz?
"As things currently stand, Iran sets the terms of risk while the United States retains the capacity to set the terms of consequence. Importantly, these are not the same thing."

By Emma Salisbury: https://theins.press/en/opinion/salisbury/295228

#defeat #sanctions #warOnIran #IranWar #Iran #Hormuz #tollbooth #oilAndGas #stateViolence #war

#defeat #sanctions #waroniran #iranwar #iran #hormuz

Félicien Breton 🍉 🔻 🌱 @[email protected] · 2026-06-27 · 18:30 UTC

"The MOU signed between the US and Iran imposes the victor’s terms. Iran got all its asks, some of which would’ve been unthinkable until recently.
"The US has promised to get Israel to cease its attacks on Hezbollah immediately. The US has accepted joint Iranian-Omani administration of Hormuz, including a de facto tollbooth. Remarkably, the US has committed to withdrawing its forces from Iran’s proximity once a final deal is reached."

To read about how much Iranian GDP could boom, you would have to subscribe: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/a-world-historic-opportunity-for

#defeat #sanctions #warOnIran #IranWar #Iran #Hormuz #tollbooth #MOU #JDVance #USWars #fossilFuels #oilAndGas

#defeat #sanctions #waroniran #iranwar #iran #hormuz

1337 $#!+ I did that @[email protected] · 2026-06-19 · 15:52 UTC

"We are in some serious shit" says analyst, but Wall St is booming for now. This history probably becomes real with the sounds of a #bubble popping, that is how #degenerate the #USA has become. If only anyone could have predicted, back in March, that #Trump would #taco and give #Iran a #Tollbooth franchise. And force other nations to cover the war reparations that Iran would demand. And that the U.S. would declare victory. Welp, see pinned. #defeat #persiangulf

https://youtu.be/pAeunYjlMzY?is=UxAQ2RjMW1khSUb5

#bubble #degenerate #usa #trump #taco #iran

WIST Quotations @[email protected] · 2026-05-01 · 20:52 UTC

A quotation from Mark Twain

   “You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
   “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
   (After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Story (1905), “The War Prayer”

More about this quote: wist.info/twain-mark/5637/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #twain #marktwain #warprayer #blood #consequences #defeat #destruction #devastation #divinewill #divinewrath #enemy #imprecation #intercession #killing #prayer #suffering #tragedy #unintendedconsequences #victory #violence #war #divineintercession #curse #divinelove

#tragedy #war #violence #blood #quote #victory

lvgaldieri @[email protected] · 2026-05-01 · 16:51 UTC

Is the Iran War the Greatest Strategic Defeat in American History?

There’s a new poll out today showing that “Trump’s war in Iran” — and it is his war, let’s make no mistake about that — “is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.”

I am not much of a poll tracker. But the Washington Post story about this new polling caught my eye, not only because I’ve been watching Emile de Antonio’s excellent 1968 Vietnam War film In the Year of the Pig on the Criterion Channel, but also because I keep running into statements like this one, from Paul Krugman’s Substack (30 April 2026):

Trump’s ego is so fragile that he can never admit losing. He cannot bear to face up to the reality that he, more or less single-handedly, led America to the greatest strategic defeat in its history. So he desperately wants to extract concessions from Iran that would lend him a fig leaf and allow him to claim victory.

Krugman is right about Trump’s “fragile ego,” but surely he needs to be more measured when it comes to what counts as the greatest strategic defeat in American history. He’s not alone. Mitchell Plitnick dedicated a whole podcast to the idea in early April. And this isn’t just a slip of Krugman’s pen. A few paragraphs later, he doubles down: “America,” he writes, “will have suffered its worst strategic defeat in history as a result of a completely gratuitous misadventure to please Trump’s ego.”

The American war in Iran might count as the quickest strategic defeat in our history, and I’m not going to deny that it’s already having and will continue to have serious geopolitical consequences. (I found the HC Commodities podcast interview with Doomberg clarifying on this point). But I have a hard time seeing how this war should count as a greater or worse and more humiliating strategic defeat or a more costly blunder (strictly in terms of blood and treasure) than Vietnam.**

At the end of his podcast, Plitnick hedges on this point:

It is about as great a strategic disaster as you can imagine. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, I mean they all pale before how stupid this was, despite the fact that they went on for years and years and year, and cost more in terms of lives and more in terms of money, because they went on so long. And that should not be minimized and in no way am I trying to minimize that. But when we talk about a strategic loss, about a strategic disaster, this is the biggest one in US history, and it was all for nothing, all for nothing.

What I take from this is that the war in Iran should count as the biggest or the greatest strategic defeat in American history because it may turn out to be the stupidest strategic defeat in American history.

There is no getting around the stupidity and recklessness and pointlessness of it all.

But I still balk at this application of the superlative to Trump’s Iran disaster. Is Krugman really asking us to start from the founding and work our way forward, ranking strategic defeats*? No, he appears just to be riffing. He never bothers to argue the historical point, never even mentions Vietnam or other examples.

Superlatives may make good clickbait, but they can also be very slippery: in just the two examples I’ve cited here, greatest can mean quickest or it can mean stupidest or maybe it can even mean most consequential. That’s unclear. Superlatives tend to muddle thinking about history, where clarity counts.

Talking about Iran as the greatest or the biggest strategic defeat in American history may score some political points, or drive some online traffic. But in this case hyperbole carries a cost. It distorts both past and present, and it can dampen political will (signaling that there is no recovering from this greatest of all defeats) or exacerbate the historical amnesia from which too many Americans already seem to suffer.

And it’s still early days, too early to judge. Trump’s war in Iran is only two months old, and the American public already appears to be decisively against it. It wasn’t until after the Tet Offensive in 1968, a full four years after the Gulf of Tonkin debacle, that public disapproval of the Vietnam War began to reach these levels, as this chart (made from the same Gallup data used by the Washington Post) shows:

That comparison all by itself is a pretty damning indictment of Trump’s war. And maybe that means a good number of Americans — not all of us, but some of us — have learned a little something from history after all.

N.B. 2 May 2026: In a conversation with Greg Sargent on The Daily Blast podcast (and published on Krugman’s Substack blog today), Krugman backs away from the superlative:

The celebration of a guy who is an absolute disaster at presidenting—he has led, more or less single-handedly, on his own decisions, his own faith, his own judgment, he has led America into one of our worst strategic defeats in our history. He took on this relatively small military power in Iran, figuring that he could destroy the regime and install his people in a few days, and he lost the war.

*PS 10 May 2026: Robert Kagan comes close to doing just that in the opening paragraphs of his new piece in The Atlantic. Though he never reaches for the hyperbole, he argues that the defeat in Iran is in a class all by itself and of tremendous historical import, a signal event in the unraveling of the American-led postwar order.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character [than in every other American war Kagan lists]. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done….the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

**Another postscript, 18 June 2026. I still balk at the superlative, but Paul Musgrave’s piece at Foreign Policy did a lot to change my mind on the comparison with Vietnam. And the MOU signed at Versailles yesterday only bolsters his argument.

#defeat #EmileDeAntonio #greatestStrategicDefeat #hyperbole #InTheYearOfThePig #limits #Peace #power #recklessness #superlatives #war

#defeat #emiledeantonio #greateststrategicdefeat #intheyearofthepig #limits #peace

WIST Quotations @[email protected] · 2026-04-03 · 16:33 UTC

A quotation from Orwell

A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade.

George Orwell (1903-1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1945-05), “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic Magazine (1945-10)

More about this quote: wist.info/orwell-george/45763/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #orwell #georgeorwell #comparison #competition #defeat #ego #face #faction #history #nationalism #prestige #takesides #usvsthem #victory #winning #nationalist