political implications
No. We do have research on how people get mindkilled. It's not about implications. Certain classes of claims for example lead to most people stop being able to use Bayes Rule when you ask them to analyse a problem. I'm claiming that the example is in that class.
Are you saying that you disagree with it personally?
A core question in this case is: "What do we gain from defining blackmail in a way that this example is covered? What do we gain from defining it in a way that this isn't covered?"
Given that most people here disapprove of the action of those persecutors politically they feel the desire to punish them by using a negative label. That makes it harder to have the discussion based on the merits.
Because "don't talk about this general fact because someone else might think it has (weak) political implications" seems a heuristic to be avoided.
That's not the heuristic brought forward in "Politics is the mindkiller". The heuristic is: You have a set A of examples (X_1, Y_1. X_2, Y_2, Y_3 ...). The X examples are political and fire up a bunch of mental biases in your reader. Most of your readers will suddenly start to flunk Bayesian calculation if you make one of those X_i examples. The Y_i examples on the other hand allow your readers to reason normally. If you want to choose an example for A, to speak about A don't choose one of the X_i but one of the Y_i.
Certain classes of claims for example lead to most people stop being able to use Bayes Rule when you ask them to analyse a problem.
Most people are unable to use Bayes' rule anyway, regardless of the class of claims.
The heuristic that one should always resist blackmail seems a good one (no matter how tricky blackmail is to define). And one should be public about this, too; then, one is very unlikely to be blackmailed. Even if one speaks like an emperor.
But there's a subtlety: what if the blackmail is being used against a whole group, not just against one person? The US justice system is often seen to function like this: prosecutors pile on ridiculous numbers charges, threatening uncounted millennia in jail, in order to get the accused to settle for a lesser charge and avoid the expenses of a trial.
But for this to work, they need to occasionally find someone who rejects the offer, put them on trial, and slap them with a ridiculous sentence. Therefore by standing up to them (or proclaiming in advance that you will reject such offers), you are not actually making yourself immune to their threats. Your setting yourself up to be the sacrificial one made an example of.
Of course, if everyone were a UDT agent, the correct decision would be for everyone to reject the threat. That would ensure that the threats are never made in the first place. But - and apologies if this shocks you - not everyone in the world is a perfect UDT agent. So the threats will get made, and those resisting them will get slammed to the maximum.
Of course, if everyone could read everyone's mind and was perfectly rational, then they would realise that making examples of UDT agents wouldn't affect the behaviour of non-UDT agents. In that case, UDT agents should resist the threats, and the perfectly rational prosecutor wouldn't bother threatening UDT agents. However - and sorry to shock your views of reality three times in one post - not everyone is perfectly rational. And not everyone can read everyone's minds.
So even a perfect UDT agent must, it seems, sometimes succumb to blackmail.