  According to McTaggart, although time is unreal, temporal judgments can be well or ill-founded in the sense that, given how things actually are, some judgments about time and temporal ordering capture real facts about the underlying reality that gives rise to the appearance of time. So, for example, reality is such that it is better to say that World War I took place after the American civil war than it is to say that the American civil war took place after World War I. Although both judgments are false, the former judgment at least correctly orders some events in a real series, whereas the latter does not.