I'd like to see links to the personal attacks you claim we're tacitly ok with. I can only think of one user who I carve out occasional exceptions for (for reasons other than you'd expect, and not someone very-high-profile). Other than that, I'm pretty confident in saying: no, we don't do that.
All this has zero to do with "SV ideological purity tests". If you follow the moderation here, you should know that we have no such "tests" and couldn't care less about "purity". Unfortunately, one consequence of that is that everyone with strong ideological passions ends up accusing us of being enforcers for the side they don't like. It's clearly a cognitive bias and probably hard-wired in all of us: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
All this has zero to do with "SV ideological purity tests". If you follow the moderation here, you should know that we have no such "tests" and couldn't care less about "purity". Unfortunately, one consequence of that is that everyone with strong ideological passions ends up accusing us of being enforcers for the side they don't like. It's clearly a cognitive bias and probably hard-wired in all of us: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....