If I tell you that the sky is blue, COVID kills people, and coal emits CO2, that's "impartial" in the sense of being facts.
The sky is also yellow, red, and purple in the mornings and evenings. It is also gray when there are storms, and black at night.
Covid kills people, but is it a lot? Or a little? Many things kill people, but I don’t get worried about lightning or sharks. Some people do. Relative to those, how dangerous is it?
Coal emits co2, but why should I care?
> I'm not ceding this ground. [...] The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative.
The humanities have long ago dispensed with facts since the advent of postmodernism; the ground has already been ceded. Yuval Noah Harari summarizes this eloquently in his latest work Nexus:
In the late twentieth century, for example, intellectuals from the
radical left like Michel Foucault and Edward Said claimed that scientific
institutions like clinics and universities are not pursuing timeless and objective
truths but are instead using power to determine what counts as truth, in the
service of capitalist and colonialist elites. These radical critiques occasionally
went as far as arguing that “scientific facts” are nothing more than a capitalist
or colonialist “discourse” and that people in power can never be really
interested in truth and can never be trusted to recognize and correct their own
mistakes.