This is easily checked, isn't it? I propose that you keep the current policy for a month, then switch to regular pre-moderated blog comments for a month.
For example - and sorry for descending to object-level current politics- I wanted to reply to Mike's off-hand mention of Putin as a successful and efficient modern authoritarian ruler with something along the lines of:
"Goddamnit, I actually live here, and I get to see the bureaucracy paralyzed with nepotism and corruption, the unsustainable loot-n-run resource-extracting economy, the barely functional public sector under perpetual directionless reform, the brewing sense of anger and despair due to social inequality, the uncontrollable and semi-criminal repressive apparatus, the growing cultural and ethnic rifts destroying what sense of shared identity us "Russians" had remaining..."
Yet such a simple listing of complaints about Mike's characterization doesn't feel like enough to fire up an email for, and I don't feel like going deeper into it. Would you view something like this as even marginally useful input?
Of course I agree that unmoderated comments would be a clusterfuck. Don't think anyone was suggesting otherwise.
Various people (including Konkvistador who has been talking about it the most) have launched their blog More Right
"A group blog, More Right is a place to discuss the many things that are touched by politics that we prefer wouldn’t be, as well as right wing ideas in general. It grew out of the correspondences among like minded people in late 2012, who first began their journey studying the findings of modern cognitive science on the failings of human reasoning and ended it reading serious 19th century gentlemen denouncing democracy. Surveying modernity, we found cracks in its façade. Findings and seemingly correct ideas, carefully bolted down and hidden, met with disapproving stares and inarticulate denunciation when unearthed. This only whetted our appetites. Proceeding from the surface to the foundations, we found them lacking. This is reflected in the spirit of the site."