The important question is when the flagging occurred by the users. If the flagging occured when most comments were culture warring, and the moderators find that to be inappropriate, then it would be good to know for future reference. If most users pressed the flag button long after the discussion switched to be more productive then I can understand what dang is talking about, but from his post I can't determine that.

Is there a documented HN policy that high-quality articles can be censored on HN because of low-quality comments? Why not allow time for low-quality comments to be downvoted/flagged and high-quality comments to arrive? If good articles could be rapidly flagged/censored, how could discussions ever "switch to be more productive"?