X-Message-Number: 30664
From: "Eisab" <>
Subject: Zuma to table cryonics proposal to get tougher 
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 22:16:55 -0400

In line with his repeated calls for South Africa to get tougher on crime, 
African National Congress president Jacob Zuma has confirmed that he will be 
putting forward proposals for the introduction of cryonics at the next party 
conference. Msholozi believes that this will achieve a balance between those 
seeking the death penalty and the life-imprisonment lobby.

Cryonics is the system of preserving humans and animals at low temperatures 
until they are resuscitated at an unknown future date. This would afford 
society the opportunity of removing criminals without killing them 
permanently.

  "Cryonics is based on a view of dying as a process that can be stopped in 
the minutes, and perhaps hours, following clinical death. If death is not an 
event that happens suddenly when the heart stops, this raises philosophical 
questions about what exactly death is.

  "In 2005, an ethics debate in the medical journal Critical Care noted that 
'few, if any, patients pronounced dead by today's physicians are in fact 
truly dead by any scientifically rigorous criteria'.

  "Cryonics proponent Thomas Donaldson has argued that "death" based on 
cardiac arrest or resuscitation failure is a purely social construction used 
to justify terminating care of dying patients. In this view, legal death and 
its aftermath are a form of euthanasia in which sick people are abandoned.

  "Philosopher Max More suggested a distinction between death associated 
with circumstances and intention versus death that is absolutely 
irreversible. Absolutely irreversible death has also been called 
information-theoretic death, which is destruction of the brain to such an 
extent that the original information content can no longer be inferred.

  "Bioethicist James Hughes has written that increasing rights will accrue 
to cryonics patients as prospects for revival become clearer, noting that 
recovery of legally dead persons has precedent in the discovery of missing 
persons.

  "Ethical and theological opinions of cryonics tend to pivot on the issue 
of whether cryonics is regarded as interment or medicine. If cryonics is 
interment, then religious beliefs about death and afterlife may come into 
consideration. Resuscitation may be deemed impossible by those with 
religious beliefs because the soul is gone, and according to most religions 
only God can resurrect the dead. Expensive interment is seen as a waste of 
resources.

  "If cryonics is regarded as medicine, with legal death as a mere enabling 
mechanism, then cryonics is a long-term coma with uncertain prognosis. It is 
continuing to care for sick people when others have given up, and a 
legitimate use of resources to sustain human life.

  "Cryonics advocates complain that theological dismissal of cryonics 
because it is interment is a circular argument because calling cryonics 
"interment" presumes that cryonics cannot work. They believe future 
technical advances will validate their view that cryonics patients are 
recoverable, and therefore never really dead." - Wikipedia

An ANC justice spokesman confirmed that the matter had been debated at party 
level for a while now. "We are of the view that a substantial part of the 
anger surrounding convicted criminals relates to the ongoing appeals which 
constitute a drain on the economy and the trauma they occasion to the 
families of the victims."

The DA's Helen Zille lambasted Zuma, saying that the party president should 
focus more on issues such as the Scorpions and less on fanciful remedies 
when dealing with crime. She called it "a proposal requiring internment 
ludicrous for overcoming our laws".

Whether or not we are ready to accept it, cryonics - like embryology - may 
well play a part in our future and particularly in the criminal justice 
system.

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