I don't know what the balance is; when people embrace "alternative facts" I think there is fundamentally not a way to have a meaningful debate. Without a common

I don't know what the balance is; when people embrace "alternative facts" I think there is fundamentally not a way to have a meaningful debate. Without a commonly accepted subset of (relevant) objective reality, all argumentation reduces to marketing. These sort of "debates" typically amount to little more than battles of charisma and oratory skill. Edit: But perhaps the more damning thing about such circumstances is that even if both debaters are charismatic, intelligent, and honest it simply results in two people talking past each other by making equally logical derivations from separate and irreconcilable sets of facts.