Well, if we are going to truly embrace that premise, then I see little room to be upset. Discussions being flagged off is the HN system acting undemocratically

Well, if we are going to truly embrace that premise, then I see little room to be upset. Discussions being flagged off is the HN system acting undemocratically to shape the discussion to its tastes. The flamewar detection system isn't smacking down topics, it smacks down types of discussions. Certain topics seem to generate little but flamewar and get regularly smacked down, indicating to me that HN has little interest in (or perhaps more accurately, ability to) discuss[ing] those topics reasonably. tl;dr: I agree, HN isn't for discussing everything. Far from not being okay with that, I think it is a good thing.