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I'm not responsible for flamebait by expressing my opinion.We're trying to be a specific kind of site. For that we need people to post in a certain way: thoughtfully, respectfully, substantively. If you post that way, you're making a positive contribution. If you don't post that way, then you're contributing to destroying this place (for its intended purpose), which is not in your interest, because the community and culture here are what makes HN worth participating in in the first place.
I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park or dump motor oil in a mountain lake, right? You'd treat those resources carefully because you know how valuable they are, and how we all have to hold them in common. It's like that here. I don't see that as an "expressing my opinion" issue—if someone dumped motor oil in a mountain lake and you asked them about it and they said "this is how I express myself", that would not be persuasive.
People tend to vastly underestimate the damage they cause (let's say 10x) and vastly overestimate the damage that other people cause (let's say another 10x), which leads to a 100x bias in evaluating these things. That's why everyone feels innocent and aggrieved and why it's so obvious that other people are the problem. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear!
If you're interested in reading a much longer explanation, here is an exchange I had with another user who was in a similar situation a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161491. I took a lot of time to write that out (it's basically an essay) because this comes up fairly regularly. The point is that the issue isn't really a moral one ("don't say bad things") - it's an optimization problem ("how do we sustain an internet forum that doesn't suck"). If you understand that then maybe you'll feel less like the moderation here is against you.