mental-health – Martin Simpson

Welcome to Psychology Corner, with Dr. Simpson (posted 10/5/25)

In a continuing series of columns featuring psychological themes, today’s topic is habituation – the process by which an organism decreases its response to any stimulus after repeated or constant exposure.

Disclaimer: I’m not a real doctor. Unless you consider “Dr.” Jill Biden a real doctor, in which case I am the wisest, most esteemed doctor in the world, by comparison. If you’d like to review my extensive experience with psychology, you can read my column from last Friday, now up at Martinsimpsonwriting.com. (Summary: I’ve watched Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting and several episodes of Frasier, and I dated a few crazy young women in college – alcohol and some deceptive attractiveness was involved – before I met my smokeshow wife in grad school and became the paragon of mental health that you see before you.)

Where was I? Oh yeah.

Like most psychological phenomena, habituation is often functional, helping one to navigate through daily life. For example, if you couldn’t “tune out” a loud air conditioner in your room, you’d go crazy. If you’re in a stuffy apartment, or standing near flatulent Fang-Fang-banger Eric Swalwell, going “nose blind” to bad odors is a good thing.

I experienced habituation from a very young age. When I was a kid, we moved to a house that backed up to railroad tracks – the Simpsons were never far from being in a country song, as regular readers may remember from Uncle Bob’s wild ride driving a tractor with flaming tires out of a smoking barn a few months ago.

Anyway, dad parlayed his great real estate instincts into buying a house with a train track in the back yard, and as it happened, a train came through every night at about 2 in the morning.

Because of course it did.

For the first week there, I woke up every night. Within a month, the train never woke me up again.

It’s a flexible phenomenon. Big city dwellers are habituated to street noises and ambulances. If they’re living in a one-party, Democrat-run city, they are quickly able to block out constant gunshots and pained screams of, “I’m dying! Why do we keep voting for this sh*t?! F**k Pritzker!” followed by agonized death rattles.

Put that same urbanite in a rural setting – if he manages to get out past the feral violent mobs bred by leftist crime policies – and the quiet will keep him awake all night.

But sometimes, habituation becomes a dysfunctional strategy; people get used to negative circumstances, and come to accept them as normal. When I was a kid, almost all the adults I knew smoked, and so did everyone in the movies, so when my parents gave us candy cigarettes as treats, we thought nothing of it.

I’m not making that up, you youngsters who don’t know how good you have it, and won’t stay off my lawn. We’d get little white candy sticks with a red tip on them, and we’d pretend to smoke them, as we prepared for an adult life of looking very cool, and then having a lung removed.

We were habituated.

Today, poor benighted souls who live in Dem-run cities drive past miles of filthy tents, walk past hundreds of supine junkies, and hop over mounds of dirty syringes that they don’t really see. They walk through wisps of vomit smells and clouds of slightly dissipated urine stench that they don’t really smell. And to them, that’s just a normal Tuesday.

They’re habituated to leftist rule.

I thought about habituation when I saw Pete Hegseth’s speech to the assembled military brass last week. Strong militaries thrive on functional, positive habituation. Quality training and discipline teaches soldiers to heighten their situational awareness, while at the same time shutting out negative distractions like fatigue, pain, and emotional stress.

Under our previous Cadaver in Chief (and several administrations before his), many elements of our military had become habituated to maladaptive behavior patterns. Bureaucrats and social justice warriors in uniform undertook idiotic pursuits such as understanding white rage, promoting DEI, and encouraging LGBTQ recruits to join, and focused more on fetishes than fighting. They produced recruiting videos featuring soldiers in drag, and others with a “the corporal has two mommies” theme.

They emphasized privates, more than training privates, and corporals, and sergeants.

When Hegseth came in, all service branches had been missing their recruiting goals for quite some time. Unexpectedly! And he has the tough job of re-habituating some of our military personnel.

He pledged to rip out the politics, and to focus on high standards that everyone would have to meet. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris….We are done with that sh*t.”

In what a good psychologist might consider a rough translation of the kind of cognitive behavioral therapy needed to counter-act negative habituation, Hegseth said, “It’s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture…. An entire generation of generals and admirals were told that they must parrot the insane fallacy that, ‘our diversity is our strength.’ Of course, we know our unity is our strength.”

If you haven’t read the transcript of his speech, you owe it to yourself to do so, because it was such a bracing dose of the truth, and a roadmap to a renewed, functional military, after years of watered-down social experimentation.

Hegseth has only been in his position for 8 months, but all of the services have already reached their yearly recruiting goals. Unexpectedly!

Because it’s Monday, I thought I’d leave you with a couple of feel-good news stories to start your week.

It’s been fun watching the good guys start winning again in Portland and Chicago, as Trump has deployed some National Guard troops in to protect ICE agents and facilities against the violent hoards of “mostly peaceful” protestors. Once again, the Dems have jumped onto the “10” side of a 90/10 issue.

I can’t see this ending well for them, because video is coming in daily, and showing who the good guys and the bad guys are. And that’s going to be an easy call for most Americans.

When the antifa thugs surrounded and rammed an ICE vehicle in Chicago, agents shot Miramar Martinez, an evil hag with a history of doxxing federal agents and inciting violence against them. Tragically, she survived the shooting, but was later arrested at a nearby hospital she had driven to for treatment.

One of the other drivers in the attack, Anthony Ruiz, was also arrested. Looking at his and Miramar’s mug shots puts you in mind of a dumber and less charismatic Charlie Manson and one of his homelier groupies.

Meanwhile, in Portland another antifa idiot got a little hilarious justice, but hopefully has a lot more coming to him. Or possibly her.

Let’s just go with “it.”

It’s a weirdo named Seth Todd, who identifies itself online as Apollo Toad, “just a lil gay non-binary toad and proud Antifa terrorist.” (Wait ‘til it finds out from leading Democrats that Antifa doesn’t exist, and is just an idea!) Todd’s pic looks like either an effeminate dude or a unsettlingly butch gal; either way, you can understand why it attends protest events dressed in an inflated frog costume.

(Let’s just say that there are no princes, or princesses, or pronoun-less prince-adjacent creatures lining up to kiss this frog.) (The judges would also have accepted, “This is one froggy that’s not likely to go a-courtin’.” Or at least not successfully.)

So Todd is toddling around outside the ICE facility with a clot of other miscreants and ne’er-do-wells and wastes of their parents’ tuition money, when a cop notices that the back of the frog costume contains a round vent with a fan drawing air into it. So the cop gives the air vent a very hearty shot of pepper spray.

And in about three seconds, that frog started hopping like it’d never hopped before!

I can only hope that an hour later – it’s eyes still burning and the frog costume ruined – it finally made it back to where it had parked. Only to find that it’s car had been…wait for it… toad!

I’m here all week, people. Happy Monday!

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Our Lefties Are Loopy, but the Finns and Germans Have Lost It! (posted 7/14/25)

To start your week off on an upbeat note, I’ll recount how two girls under the age of 14 have applied the Simpson Gender Confirming Protocol™ to a surprised volunteer on the Fourth of July. The girls were swimming at the Little Platte Swim Beach in Missouri and waiting for the fireworks to start when a strange man swam up to them.

After asking them inappropriate questions, he allegedly groped them and tried to remove part of their swimming suits. They administered a SGCP™ maneuver to him (i.e. kicked him in the groin), then got out of the water and alerted their parents. The groper had apparently been identified by the SGCP™ as an intact male, because the police were able to catch him as he limped toward the parking lot a short time later.

The miscreant – one Carlos Climaco-Garcia – only had identification from Guatemala, and was found with someone with an ICE detainer. So the police reported that “the suspect’s citizenship status is unknown.”

Because of course they did. (I’m sure that his great-great-great-great abuelo and abuela came over on the Mayflower.)

Sure, technically this creep wasn’t claiming to be a female trapped in a male body when he underwent the procedure – the primary test subjects for which I’d invented the SGCP™. But the salutary effect the procedure had in this case is a testament to the incredible versatility of the SGCP™. Is there anything it can’t do?

It slices, it dices, it determines gender, it dissuades descendants of pilgrims who celebrate Independence Day by groping pre-teen girls.

It’s going to be tough to work that into my Nobel prize acceptance speech, but I accept the challenge.

Speaking of immigration-related foolishness, I’m beginning to suspect that Trump has planted a bunch of undercover agents in the leftist “peaceful riots” movement to discredit all leftist efforts to fight deportation. The only alternative is that that movement is littered with poor souls with Crockettian levels of intelligence. (Yes, I have turned Jasmine Crockett’s name into an adjective indicating barely detectable levels of brain activity.)

In every anti-ICE protest story, MSM and Democrat commenters describe ICE acting like the Gestapo, terrorizing blameless citizens, and arresting Gandhi-esque peaceful protestors for no reason at all.

And then video comes out, and it shows that the ICE officers were arresting a bunch of illegals and showing great restraint while violent mobs of protestors screamed and interfered and attacked them.

To pick just one example, we can look at the case of Jonathan Caravello. He is a Cal State Channel Islands (?) professor and a member of “an anti-racism, social justice union” which is now claiming that he was “kidnapped” for no reason by federal agents last Thursday, during a peaceful protest of an illegal raid by fascists.

Alternatively, he was “protesting” at the raid on the Glass House pot farm, where a lot of illegals were found. A US Attorney says that Caravello “was arrested for throwing a tear gas canister at law enforcement” and is charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers or employees.”

Customs and Border Protection officials said that 10 of the illegals found there were juveniles, and 8 of those were unaccompanied minors. Oddly enough, the Glass House corporation has been “hit with multiple wage and labor law complaints in recent years,” and the president and co-founder has donated many thousands of dollars to Democrats in CA, including $10K to Ken-Doll Newsom.

Unexpectedly!

While we’ve all been told that you can’t judge a book by its cover, we’ve all also noticed that you can very often judge a book by its cover. And if you’ll look up Caravello’s faculty photo – the official one, that he posed for, knowing it would go on the university’s website! – you’ll see what looks like the cover of a book entitled, “Nightmare Journals: What if Charles Manson and A Crazy Karen from Libs of Tik-Tok Had a Baby?”

He’s got the wildly unbrushed long hair, the sad attempt at a beard. And the eyes. Always the crazy eyes. And again, this was an official photo! You just know that the photographer had to say something like, “Hey Jon, would you like to borrow a comb before I take this professional picture?”

And Caravello said, “No, no, I’m good. I’m going for the Jim Ignatowski from Taxi look.” And damned if he didn’t nail it!

He also has a pic on a CSU-associated Instagram page, a self-dramatizing shot of him posing with a fist upraised and a somber expression. (By the way, in that photo he’s got a SFPI™ [Simpson Face Punchability Index] rating of 93 out of 100.)

But before you conclude that the US of A is the most screwed up country when it comes to dealing with immigration, I’ve got to stop you right there. Because the nations of Finland and Germany exist, and they have been making complete fools of themselves on this subject.

I can’t say that I’ve thought a lot about the Finns during my life – around here, when you discuss the Finns, you’re talking about the Miami Dolphins – but what thoughts I’ve had have been positive. I like Scandinavian types, and I love the fact that plucky little Finland kicked some Soviet arse in the Winter War.

And I find a lot to like about Germany too, despite their…oh, let’s call it “uneven performance” in the 20^th century. But both Germany and Finland have in recent years decided that it would be a great idea to welcome a large group of Islamic immigrants into their countries. And things have not gone swimmingly.

Unexpectedly!

Finland’s population is one of the oldest in Europe, and whiter than Liz Warren. #wemustneverstopmockingher (The white part is irrelevant; I just couldn’t pass up a chance to mock the Albino Apache.) The majority (70%) of Islamic asylum seekers in Finland, on the other hand, are male and under 35, and they come from cultures who believe that foreign women who reveal more than their eyes are infidel harlots who are there for the taking.

Thus, a story in the liberal Helsinki Times that tried to downplay migrant crime, had to admit that “Certain nationalities…have been disproportionately represented in specific crime categories. Iraqi and Somali men, for example, appear more frequently as suspects in sexual and drug-related offenses.”

Odottamatta! (That’s Finnish for “Unexpectedly!”) (Research!)

So what have the Finns done to combat the (migrant) sex assault crisis? The town of Oulu spent 2.5 million euros to make the strangest video you’ve ever seen. As soon as you’re done reading this column, look it up – search for “Finland no-no video” – because I’m not sure I can do it justice with a verbal description.

But I’ll try.

Five Finns stand in what looks like a hallway – three women in front, and two men behind – and they gyrate and gesture to what sounds like a $4 synthesizer. They have grimly serious looks on their faces and never open their mouths, but a voice-over song repeats these lyrics, which I swear to you I am not making up: “Stop, don’t touch me there/This is my no-no square.”

It’s tough to pick which element of the video is more amateurish. The music is terrible, the lyrics are a joke, and I could “dance” as well as these people do. (And that comparison is not even damning with faint praise. It’s just damning!)

But the choreography. Good lord, the choreography! When they say, “Stop,” they hold a hand up to the camera, palm out. When they say, “Don’t touch me there,” they cross their arms in an “X.” When they say, “This is,” they point at their hips, and then they gesture vaguely at their thorax as they say, “my no-no square.” Then they hold both arms out to their sides, bent at the elbow with their forearms hanging down, and gyrate back at forth.

If you haven’t seen the great South Park’s parody of this very type of misguided liberal insanity, you have to find and watch the episode where the school has a mascot come to visit the children and sing a song to teach them about sexual harassment.

Search “Sexual Harassment Panda song,” and behold some satirists putting the Finns to shame. But trigger warning: that stupid song is an earworm, and you may find yourself humming it to yourself for several days.

I’ll try to paint the picture: A guy in a panda suit stands in class and does a minimalist jig, while singing in a voice muffled by a panda costume head, accompanied by what sounds like a middle-school quartet recording of a circus merry-go-round soundtrack.

The immortal lyrics:

“Who lives in the east ‘neath a willow tree? Sexual harassment… panda

Who explains sexual harassment to you and me? Sexual harassment… panda

Don’t say that! Don’t touch there!

Don’t be nasty says the silly bear.

He’s come to tell you what’s right and wrong. Sexual harassment… panda.”

The Finns could have saved themselves 2.5 million euros and had a better product if they’d just dubbed over those lyrics in Finnish. If they wanted to make it a little more relatable to their Finnish audience, they could have used AI to sub-in a native Finnish animal, producing the same video about the “Sexual Harassment… Reindeer.”

Germany has the same problem – an increasing rate of sexual crimes, and a rate of violent crimes committed by foreigners that is 400% higher than that of native Germans – but they’ve reacted even more stupidly than the Finns, if that is possible.

The Germans have created a series of cartoon “Don’t touch me there” educational posters depicting gropers at public swimming pools, an environment that has proved problematic for interactions between Islamic males and scantily clad German women and girls.

It’s sad enough that a country would even have to create a campaign to explain to people that sexual assault is bad. But it’s infuriating that the German posters actually cast the Germans as the villains and the foreign immigrants as the victims!

I’m not making that up. One poster shows two white boys shoving a brown girl into a pool. Another shows a white boy grabbing the butt of a brown girl as they’re both floating in the pool. A third shows a white guy in swim trunks going into a women’s locker room to peep at a brown woman in a towel.

And best of all, a fourth poster shows a large white woman with red hair floating in a pool behind a brown male, who is for some reason missing his lower leg! He’s got a peg leg there, presumably from being blown off in a peaceful suicide bombing or by an IED, I guess?

And the redhead is grabbing his butt with both hands!

So it’s not just male Germans who are vile, groping offenders. Female Europeans also cannot be trusted around Muslim males, who are apparently stereotypically known for being sexually preyed upon by infidel women! (Oh, won’t someone think of the Muslim males?! Where is their “Me Too” campaign?)

Bah! The slow-motion suicide of much of the European West should be a powerful warning to us. Our elite leftists are as reflexively dishonest as the Europeans – they refer to illegal immigrants as “immigrants” or “undocumented migrants;” they call legal arrests “kidnapping” or “disappearing innocent people;” they call men “women,” and gender-denying mutilations “gender-affirming treatment.”

But most Americans see through those lies, and reject them.

Not the Europeans. Throughout much of the EU, members of groups who disproportionately prey on European women are not only not chastised, they are cast as victims. And a public “education” campaign that is supposed to decrease sexual harassment cannot even honestly identify the source of the problem.

One bit of good news: after sustained backlash and public pressure, the idiotic German posters were removed and an apology issued. So maybe there’s hope for Europe yet.

Speaking of how we can often judge books by their covers, I found a picture of the German woman who created the public service posters in Germany, and she looks exactly as you would expect her to:

Large very white lady, wearing a childish black-and-green horizontally striped sweatshirt (and those stripes are NOT slimming). Round, large glasses, unhinged smile. And her dark hair is dyed bright green.

Because of course it is.

Rumors that she is the white lefty lady who would have had carnal knowledge of Charlie Manson and produced California kidnapping victim Professor Jonathan Caravello have not been confirmed.

Hamas delenda est!

Response to Last Week’s Posts About Debating Lefties, + My Dark Secret (posted 5/15/25)

By the time you read this, I’ll be on the road up to Tennessee, and then on to Illinois. I think I’ll be posting a column tomorrow on the Dems’ entertaining, continuing implosion, and I’ll do my best to post at least one or two columns next week from the road.

Last week I posted a slightly edited version of an email exchange I recently had with an old friend of mine who is a committed lefty, on the subject of the rule of law, and the potential for a “constitutional crisis” that may arise if SCOTUS doesn’t shut down the dozens of district court judges who are filing frivolous lawfare TROs against every move he makes.

Many of you asked how he responded to the points I made, and many said that they have stopped even trying to discuss politics with the lefties in their lives.

I haven’t heard back from my friend about my last two responses yet. He received the first one the night before he was leaving on a two-week trip, and said that he’d need time to go through it and think about it, and I sent him the second one while he was on the road, and said we could talk about it when he gets back.

But over many years of such exchanges, I think that each of us has changed the other’s mind on individual points, but not on any of our larger beliefs. (E.g. I think I’ve been able to prove to him that individual lefties have been corrupt and that some conservatives have governed better than some lefties, but not that leftism itself is based on false premises and doesn’t work in the real world.) He’s one of four leftist friends of mine, and I think that statement applies to all four of them.

Since none of them are the deranged, extremist, “you’re cancelled if you don’t agree with me” types, I’ve still been able to discuss politics with them, to varying degrees. And I appreciate that, for a couple of reasons. As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy clarifying and testing my arguments in good-faith debates. (Teaching argumentative and persuasive writing was a good fit for me!)

I also think that my friends and I have served a very useful moral purpose for each other: reminding all of us that the other side is not made up entirely of malevolent idiots and worse. It’s very easy to watch bad-faith hypocrites and liars like Biden, Schumer, Grandma Squanto et al and start thinking of all Democrats as irredeemable creeps. (And there are plenty of GOP morons who can make regular conservatives look like idiots!) But knowing my friends reminds me – and I hope that knowing me reminds them – that that’s not the case.

In a way, this point dovetails nicely with my Christian faith. We’re supposed to be as aware of our own flaws as we are of others’ flaws, and it’s good to be reminded of other people’s foibles in a way that doesn’t lead us to demonize them. People make ridiculous choices in many areas of their lives, not just in politics.

Some people willingly drink ouzo. Some are vegans. Some root for FSU. Some like soccer. Some don’t like dogs. And some vote down-the-line Democrat. What are we going to do? Uncle Jesus tells me I’m supposed to love them anyway, and reminds me that I might have made a few stupid choices along the way myself.

I mean, you wouldn’t know it by looking at me, with my smoke show wife, my great kids, and my Wonder Dog, living my best life in the Free State of Florida. But even I have had some dark chapters in my life.

What I’m about to share with you needs to stay between us, and if you repeat it, I’ll deny it. Like Joy Reid when her homophobic posts came out, I’ll just claim that my email was hacked. (Joy Reid is this angry racist lady who used to be on tv. Or on MSNBC. Which is kind of like tv, except without the viewers.)

So if others are in the room or reading this over your shoulder who can’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut, please go somewhere else, or ask them to leave.

Okay. Here it goes.

I was basically a Democrat until I was in my late 20s.

I know. I just threw up in my mouth a little, too. And Cassie just looked at me with her head turned sideways, because I forgot that she can read. Annnndddd… now she’s trotting out of the room, giving me a withering look back over her shoulder.

Please, let me explain!

I was pretty a-political as a teen and young adult. I was one of those weird young men who was preoccupied with sports and girls, with an added layer of voracious-reader book nerd.

Then I went to grad school for seven years (the PhD took me an extra year because I wrote a novel instead of my dissertation in my fourth year), where I was surrounded by lefty professors and students.

The pressure to conform was pretty strong. If taking a lefty position in class was more likely to get me the 4.0 that I was looking for, okay. If pretending to have read Das Kapital and Noam Chomsky’s latest drivel increased the chances that a female classmate would overlook my pedestrian appearance and thrust herself upon me, I’m in. (If not like Flynn, at least like a young, proto-Martacus.) (100-year-old movie references for $100, Alex.)

Whew, this is tough to write. In the years since, my shame has driven me to confession about this multiple times. And I’m not even Catholic! I’d just randomly stop in a Catholic church and step into the shame booth. (Have I mentioned that I’m not Catholic?) But even then, I’d be tempted to falsely confess to murder or robbing a nun, just to avoid saying the words, “I once voted for Jimmy Carter.”

In my defense, I’d never paid enough attention to politics to be a down-the-line lefty. I’d always had enough common sense to know that affirmative action was just reverse racism, and that abortion was wrong, for example. And as I was forced to read leftist literary criticism – anti-Americanism and CRT were already making themselves felt, even in the Midwest, in the 1980s – I started to feel more and more repulsed.

By the time I finished my PhD, I had resolved never to read Lacan, Derrida, Marcuse or any of those weirdos again. In fact, I started to read a lot of history, and then military history. And then I came across Thomas Sowell, and Milton Friedman, and eventually VDH.

Within two years of getting out, I was a confirmed conservative.

My transformation was completed a few years later, when I realized that the vow of poverty that I’d taken when I became an English professor was not a joke. I started researching ways to buy fixer-upper real estate so that I might be able to retire before age 90.

Some real-world experience with entrepreneurial risk-taking quickly cured me of the last vestiges of my youthful dalliance with liberalism, and I started down the road to becoming the conservative stalwart you know and admire today.

Thus I became the old political cliché: a soft-hearted, naïve liberal at 20, but a reality-appreciating conservative by 30.

My example does give me hope, though: sometimes it seems as if everybody is in their own bubbles, and people cling so stubbornly to their own priors. But I made the change, both through reading ideas from the other side, and from life experience. My guess is that the latter changes a lot more minds – the old “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged” idea.

But as a bookish type with a taste for logic and argument, my conversion began and moved pretty far along purely because of reading and thinking, before I staked my meager life savings on several real estate investments, and thus sealed the deal.

So while it often seems that our politics are so polarized in recent years, I still retain some cautious optimism that at least some liberals are persuadable. In fact, their own party’s insane race to the far left is pushing some of them toward our side by default.

I think many of these types now feel – or soon will – like Reagan did when he said that he didn’t leave the Democrats, the Democrats left him. Elon certainly does. A year or two ago he posted a cartoon showing him standing in the same place, but the leftists running so far to the extreme left that his unchanged position – which was once a little left of center – is now firmly on the right.

A similar process happened for RFK Jr., Tulsi, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Adam Carolla, and many more.

So I enjoy debating my lefty friends, even though I don’t expect that any of them will necessarily undergo the conversion that I did.

But even if they only become more aware of and turned off by the extremists on the far left, they will be doing themselves and the nation some good.

Our country would be better off with a sane, center-left liberal party, and a much more marginalized and impotent far-left fringe (rather than the radicals who are steering the Democrats today).

Such a centrist party could mitigate the damage done when the Dems next have power, and could even be cooperative partners with some conservatives on a small range of issues where we have some common ground.

If I’m being honest, I can’t say that I see that happening anytime very soon. But we’re cautious optimists around here, and I’m trying to keep that hope alive!

Hamas delenda est!

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