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SAN DIEGO - Opinion editorializing is by nature a vain undertaking. It is arrogance on display. What it boils down to is this: I’ve got something to say and inasmuch as I have the temerity to put it in print, I expect you to read it, whether or not you’re likely to agree with it and whether or not you even care. This site is dedicated to the proposition that a good editorial should make you flinch.

Opinions are like assholes – everyone’s got one – and writers’ opinions, like their assholes, often contribute nothing more important, thought-provoking, humorous, insightful or otherwise significant in our lives than any other opinion, or indeed any other asshole. More often a writer is simply another puckered, stained, used and neglected spout from which flows foul solids and occasional methane bursts. Not to strain the analogy, but I suppose it’s little wonder that so much editorializing today amounts to pure shit and a fart in the wind.

We here at the Daily Flinch are persuaded that there still is something important about opinion editorial, or at least there should be. In the twilight of the newspaper age, as good writing hides itself in dank halls and genuine expression of well thought-out ideas scurries for the underbrush, it is important that valid, reasonable, cogently argued opinions get expressed. Indeed the very survival of free thinking might well hinge on such expression. And that’s where the flinch test comes in. If one reads a thing, flings it casually aside and proceeds back to scrolling through search screens to find an image of Demi Moore, then what one read was a waste of one’s time. If it was any good, it would make one flinch.

Think of it like a fake punch: if delivered too slowly, too predictably or too feebly, it will provoke no response. But if thrust suddenly, unexpectedly and with sufficient force, it will make the target flinch. Flinching is the reaction that proves it worked. If an editorial doesn’t make you flinch, it failed. Simple as that. And with that, welcome to our site.