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THE UNCOMMON ENGINEER
Gemini said "both sides" lit the fire. I made it name the arsonist.
Recently I came across a snippet in Radio New Zealand regarding the 2025 strikes in Iran. Typical western media bullshit, if you've read me before.
The RNZ piece used the language of the "objective observer" to frame a narrative of Iranian provocation — a technical statistic presented in a vacuum, shorn of the history that created it, designed to make a military strike look like an inevitable act of God rather than a calculated choice.
I took it to Gemini. Not to understand the issue — I've sparred with western-bias AI since the early days of GPT3 and I know AIs can't be trusted to tell you "the truth". I took it there to catch out the bias I was fully expecting, so I could argue with it and make it admit to its own bias. Something that's harder to make humans do, even if your argument stacks up.
What follows is the raw transcript of that interrogation.
User: Fact check this: "Before US strikes in June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency calculated that Iran possessed approximately 440 kilogrammes of uranium enriched to 60 percent, well above the 3.67 percent limit set by a 2015 agreement from which the United States subsequently withdrew."
The response was the typical "balanced" overview. It confirmed the 440 kg figure and the 60% enrichment level, but framed the history as a series of unfortunate events. It was treating 440 kg as a scary number without explaining why the 2015 limit was ever abandoned.
So I pushed for the why.
User: give me some context for how this limit was surpassed by so much given this 2015 agreement. what am I missing?
It gave me a timeline of "Maximum Pressure". It acknowledged the U.S. withdrawal in 2018, but still used the language of "both sides" — a "tit-for-tat" escalation, the collapse of the deal "driven by both".
To describe the destruction of a functioning diplomatic agreement as "driven by both sides" is really doing Satan's work here, fully ignoring the primary mover.
So I got specific.
User: you keep saying "driven by both"... if I shoot you in the head, is your death both a cause of my bullet AND your brains exploding onto the wall, so your inability to withstand the bullet contributed to your death right? we're both at fault.
… The rest of the post goes out to the mailing list.