Maybe a bug in chmod (and others) making command recursive

[operations]

I just was wondering why suddenly all my files in a directory tree had the same 
chmod. After researching, I found out that a file existed which name was -R (in 
my case due to a mistyped wget-command). Here the steps to reproduce:

System: Ubuntu LTS 12.04.5 

== Working:
mkdir folder
touch test
touch folder/test
ls -lR

Output:
| .:
| insgesamt 4
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 18 17:38 folder
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Nov 18 17:38 test
| 
| ./folder:
| insgesamt 0
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 18 17:38 test

chmod 777 *
ls -lR

Output:
| .:
| insgesamt 4
| drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 Nov 18 17:38 folder
| -rwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Nov 18 17:38 test
| 
| ./folder:
| insgesamt 0
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 18 17:38 test

== Strange behaviour:
mkdir folder
touch test
touch folder/test
ls -lR

Output:
| .:
| insgesamt 4
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 18 17:38 folder
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Nov 18 17:38 test
| 
| ./folder:
| insgesamt 0
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 18 17:38 test

echo dummy > -R
chmod 777 *
ls -lR
touch test

Output:
| .:
| insgesamt 8
| drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 Nov 18 17:57 folder
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root    6 Nov 18 17:57 -R
| -rwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Nov 18 17:57 test
| 
| ./folder:
| insgesamt 0
| rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Nov 18 17:57 test <---- this should not happen!

I'm uncertain whether this is a chmod bug or not, as using ./* instead of * 
works as expected - it may also be expected. But on the other hand, having 
security-related commands like chmod doing different things depending on the 
files in the current directory seems to me also not to be the correct 
behaviour. BTW This above also applies to rm, which deletes all the files 
recursively if there is a file called -r in the directory (at least there is a 
sentence about files with leading "-", even no information that they make rm 
recursive ...)

Thanks,
Thomas