We're discouraged by moderation here from arguing about why things are flagged. If you think something is flagged erroneously, the thing to do is to mail hn@ycombinator.com and tell them; they'll look at who's flagging and what the story is, and sometimes remove the flag weights.
There's a way to write the same comment without begging for this kind of meta-argument: just write a paragraph that doesn't talk about ranking and flagging but says what you found unexpectedly interesting or thoughtful about the article.
> We're discouraged by moderation here from arguing about why things are flagged.
Thanks for informing me, I wasn’t aware of that. I did know the part about emailing. Though, I wonder how this impacts in a fast-moving forum like HN where if a post fails to meet a critical threshold, it gets dropped.
(I am aware of the second chance queue but I don’t know if they too have similar weights of “needing upvotes steadily to survive”. I think the posted article was important for HN readers to see and hence asked in my first comment.)
I don't think stories like this have much of a chance on the front page regardless. There's more than one force pushing them down: they're political, which attracts flags, they're not technical, which (usually unreasonably) attracts flags, and they're volatile, which sets off the flame-war detector. The big thing though is you can't stage a debate about flags on the thread itself; whatever you think of those flags, debating them publicly works against your goal.
There's a way to write the same comment without begging for this kind of meta-argument: just write a paragraph that doesn't talk about ranking and flagging but says what you found unexpectedly interesting or thoughtful about the article.