Grasping reality

In one sense you could argue that there is no reality.  Everything we perceive is filtered via our minds and we can't be sure that what we perceive to be true actually is.

You can trace this back to some of our earliest philosophers and its a fun thing to discuss, especially if you are enjoying some reality distorting refreshments.

However, in general we have a pretty good idea that we are perceiving for the most part the same things the rest of humanity is perceiving so we can define reality by that standard, since any other standard would lead to chaos.

We get on an airplane trusting the reality of the science that brings us flight.  We eat food trusting that the people who provide it and inspect it are using real standards.

Now one thing that some people do is look for an anomaly to question something they don't accept or want to accept.

Take something like voter fraud.  Registering to vote is generally something you only have to do once.  Finding people who registered years ago and subsequently moved or died is to be expected, especially if the scrubbing of voter rolls is low priority.  Its low priority because what matters is who actually votes.

Now we know the dead people aren't voting and the odds of someone travelling between states to vote more than once is something which wouldn't be happening on any scale big enough to matter.

These are not evidence of voter fraud to anyone with a grasp of reality.

Now take something like climate change.  One can find examples of climate change throughout the history of our planet which were caused by non-human events but that doesn't eliminate or bring into question the science that tells us that adding enormous amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will impact the earth's temperature. This would be a factor that exists in addition to any naturel changes and clearly we are releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

The math and the science behind that are not really in question.  To have a political discourse about this is simply insane, the science is real and the discussion should be what needs to be done.

Of course you do need that grasp of reality I mentioned which seems to be becoming less prevalent.