#recklessness — Public Fediverse posts

"A Sacramento immigration law firm claims #ICE agents arrived at its office without a warrant, threatened to break in, and targeted the firm based on a list of addresses allegedly linked to undocumented immigrants":
https://www.kcra.com/article/sacramento-immigration-law-firm-ice-agents/73441433
#brutality #thuggery #recklessness #HumanRights #CivilLiberties #politics

"Trump Dismisses Reports About Dire Conditions Aboard U.S. Aircraft Carrier. Asked whether the deployment of the Abraham Lincoln had gone on too long, the president said its deployment had lasted 'not nearly long enough'.”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/us/politics/trump-uss-abraham-lincoln.html
#DisloyalTrump #PutinsPuppet #mismanagement #recklessness #politics

A quotation from Homer

The recklessness of their ways destroyed them all.
 
[Αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο.]

Homer (fl. 7th-8th C. BC) Greek author
The Odyssey [Ὀδύσσεια], Book 1, l. 7ff (1.7) (c. 700 BC) [tr. Fagles (1996)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/homer/46491/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #homer #odyssey #consequence #death #destruction #divinejudgment #folly #incaution #punishment #recklessness

After Elon #Musk called an editor who is also a great journalist: "A traitor to the West,"
Chef Jose Andres wrote: "Elon drink a glass of water before you tweet. You may build rockets and satellites and cars and anything else you want, and we thank you! But you can not call a great journalist that actually ask you good questions an enemy to humanity! You sound and act like a tyrant. Change!"
#arrogance #recklessness #PoorJudgment

"Some Republicans fear the eye-popping new levies Pres. Donald Trump threatened to slap on Canada and generic drug makers this week will aggravate Americans who were already blaming the #tariffs for stubborn #inflation ahead of a midterm election dominated by economic issues":
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/23/oh-crap-those-are-bad-things-trumps-new-tariffs-threatening-further-dampen-gop-midterm-enthusiasm-01008536
#politics #incompetence #recklessness

"Pres. Donald Trump said Wednesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should continue traffic stops after two deadly shootings within a week, seeming to contradict a new policy to halt them":
https://apnews.com/live/trump-administration-ice-dhs-updates-07-15-2026?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share
#Trump #WorstPresidentEver #racism #recklessness #PublicSafety #immigration #HumanRights copy: @renewedresistance #politics

"Lawsuit says U.S. immigration agencies illegally shared confidential information on Iranian asylum seekers with Iran":
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/lawsuit-says-u-s-immigratoin-agencies-illegally-shared-confidential-information-on-iranian-asylum-seekers-with-iran
#recklessness #mismanagement #HumanRights #politics

"Nearly 1 million people who bought Pres. Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/us/politics/trump-coin-crypto-investors-loss.html
"Donald Trump has cashed in at the expense of his followers."
#gambling #recklessness #AFoolAndHisMoneyAreSoonParted

Elon Musk's #DOGE ended #USAID in a terrible way. It cut off all activity so suddenly that food was allowed to rot in warehouses when hungry people needed it. Medicine was similarly wasted.
#recklessness #hunger #greed #heartlessness #politics

RE: https://mastodon.social/@RonSupportsYou/116782447401609409

Dr. Vin Gupta: "Watching a flu outbreak sweep through a major military training installation after Pete Hegseth pointlessly politicized the vaccine requirement is a reminder that viruses are unimpressed by amateur political theater."
#extremism #incompetence #politics #recklessness #WorstCabinetEver

"Scores Fall Ill at Air Force Base After Hegseth Makes Flu Vaccine Optional":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/flu-outbreak-air-force-base.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
#NationalSecurity #healthcare #extremism #incompetence #politics #recklessness

Sen. Mark Warner: "Donald Trump’s pick for Acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, is dangerously unqualified for the role. This move threatens the independence of our intelligence community and the safety of all Americans."
#SecurityRisk #Trump #PutinsPuppet #recklessness #NationalSecurity #politics

Kyle Cheney: "In appeals court fight over the White House #ballroom, Department of Justice says the federal government could quickly bulldoze the statute of liberty, and no one would have standing to sue over the changes once the demolition is done."

Jessica Tarlov: "They’re out of their minds."
#injustice #recklessness #destructiveness #politics

"Trump Hits the Stalemate Phase of His International Interventions, and It Stings. In Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran, Pres. Trump’s early declarations of easy wins have given way to harsh reality":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/us/politics/trump-iran-stalemate-ukraine-gaza.html
"The American ambassador to Russia is a job that has been open, astoundingly, for nearly a year."
#incompetence #recklessness copy: @renewedresistance

"It is not easy being a #veteran watching Pres. Donald Trump’s reckless misuse of the #military. As the Trump administration slashes Department of Veterans Affairs services and fires principled military leaders, we are seeing it commit the same mistakes and #incompetence that got us deployed in forever wars going back to Vietnam":
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/memorial-day-trump-iran-war-viet-nam-22268759.php
#recklessness #mismanagement #politics copy: @renewedresistance

A quotation from Shakespeare

FRIAR LAWRENCE: These violent delights have violent ends
   And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
   Which, as they kiss, consume.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, sc. 6, l. 9ff (2.6.9-11) (1595)

More about this quote: wist.info/shakespeare-william/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #shakespeare #romeoandjuliet #friarlawrence #allconsuming #ardor #burning #devotion #enthusiasm #fervor #intensity #passion #recklessness #violence #zeal

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.

"Trump has been the most high-profile purveyor of violent language toward his political opponents since he stepped onto the national stage as a political contender in 2015":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/opinion/trump-assassination-attempts-political-violence.html
#extremism #recklessness #politics

"Pete Hegseth quoted a fake Bible verse from Pulp Fiction during a Pentagon sermon." James Surowiecki wrote: "Pete Hegseth quoting a Quentin Tarantino hit man while believing (or pretending to believe) he was quoting the Bible is the most Pete Hegseth thing ever."
#incompetence #recklessness #politics #IranWar

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said: "A note to the American #media. I just can't help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage you cannot resist peddling despite the historic and important success of this effort and the success of our troops."
#politics #incompetence #recklessness

"For Israel, War Is the Only Answer":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/opinion/international-world/israel-war-strategy.html
"War is increasingly the Israel’s go-to response to geopolitical challenges — not just the strategy but the norm."
#HumanRights versus #Israel #recklessness #destructiveness

On Sunday, '60 Minutes' interviewed three Catholic Cardinals who were appropriately critical of the wars and behavior of Donald Trump.

One Cardinal said: "We are seeing the possibility of war after war after war" started by Donald Trump.

Trump ordered military attacks against Iran, then Venezuela, now Iran again, and in the near future maybe against Greenland and Cuba.
#Trump is in a #WorldWarAgainstTheWorld. #politics #military.
#recklessness #destructiveness #extremism #incompetence.

"Trump’s irresponsibility has left the United States on the cusp of a humiliating strategic defeat ... Four Ways Trump’s War Is Weakening America":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/opinion/trump-iran-war-incompetence-america.html
#IranWar #incompetence #recklessness #OperationEpicFailure #politics copy: @renewedresistance

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries fairly said about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: "He was a FOX News host, and now he is the Secretary of Defense? No wonder things are turning out so horrifically."
#incompetence #recklessness #PoorJudgment #WorstCabinetEver #IranWar

Trump "spent the first year of his presidency doing everything he could to degrade America’s relationship with its European allies in particular, undermine the NATO alliance, threaten territorial acquisition against a NATO member, just all kinds of destructive things. And so you shouldn’t be surprised that when you bully people and then you come to them hat in hand for help, they say: No thanks. Not going to do it":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/opinion/trump-iran-save-act-reckless.html
#IranWar #incompetence #recklessness #PutinsPuppet

“I think Trump’s Pearl Harbor comment was stupid,
but to me the war he started is a much bigger problem”:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/22/surprise-embarrassment-unease-japan-pearl-harbor-00839369
#IranWar #incompetence #recklessness #PutinsPuppet