Adam Serwer

Reporter

Adam Serwer is a reporter at Mother Jones. Formerly a staff writer at the American Prospect, he has written for the Washington Post, the Root, the Village Voice, and the New York Daily News.

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BioShock Infinite: An American History Lesson Where You Get to Blow Shit Up

Video game visionary Ken Levine on the nerd mainstream, screen violence, and mining the past for narrative.

—By Adam Serwer

| Fri May. 10, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

A Motorized Patriot from BioShock Infinite

One of the deadly Motorized Patriots you'll encounter in BioShock Infinite. Irrational Games

Ken Levine has schooled millions of Americans on the flaws in Ayn Rand's fantasies, but he's no political pundit. The 46-year-old cofounder of Quincy, Massachusetts, studio Irrational Games made his mark as the visionary behind a series of astute video games whose Tarantinoesque violence masks subtler points. BioShock, released in 2007, imagines a corporate magnate named Andrew Ryan going Galt and building his own objectivist paradise under the ocean; his self-interested society has collapsed and descended into a Hobbesian horror that the player must escape. The game was a massive success, selling more than 5 million copies and defying the stereotype of gamers as intellectual zombies.

In late March, Irrational released BioShock Infinite, a new title set on the World's Fair-inspired sky city of Columbia, circa 1912. Here, the ruling Founders—white nativist worshippers of America's Founding Fathers who seek to preserve the city as a neo-Confederate paradise—clash with populist extremists called the Vox Populi who claim to represent the downtrodden. As haunted cavalry veteran Booker DeWitt, players blast their way through an extended meditation on American exceptionalism and a critique of our idealized past in their quest to rescue a mysterious character named Elizabeth. (The only thing missing is a college syllabus.) I spoke with Levine about growing up nerd, mining history for narrative, and the media's paternalistic view of his industry. But first, to get a taste, watch this short commercial for the game:

Mother Jones: Nerds seem kind of cool these days. Does "nerd Siberia," as you describe the emotional state of geek isolation, still exist?

Ken Levine: There is this thing going on now, which is really baffling to me: A lot of guys are challenging women who claim to be nerds as to the veracity of their nerd cred. Man, when I was young, if there was any woman who wanted to be anywhere near us, we would be thrilled! I think people should count their blessings.

[Read the full article]

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Conservative Immigration Scholar: Black and Hispanic Immigrants Are Dumber Than European Immigrants

Jason Richwine, who coauthored a Heritage Foundation study on immigration, didn't just argue that certain minorities are dumber in his scholarship—he also said it at a public panel.

—By Adam Serwer

| Wed May. 8, 2013 4:50 PM PDT

Sam72/Shutterstock

Jason Richwine, the coauthor of the conservative Heritage Foundation's controversial study on the supposed $6.3 trillion cost of comprehensive immigration reform, has received much attention and criticism for his 2009 Harvard dissertation that argued there was "a genetic component" to racial disparities in IQ. But this dissertation wasn't the first time Richwine had expressed such views publicly. In 2008, he told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute that "major" ethnic or racial differences in intelligence between the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants who flocked to the United States at the turn of the 20th century and the immigrants coming to the US today justified severely restricting immigration.

Richwine's remarks, which he made as a resident fellow at AEI, did not receive much public notice at the time, but they go beyond the arguments presented in his 2009 dissertation. In that dissertation, "IQ and Immigration Policy," which was first reported by Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post, Richwine argued for restricting immigration based on IQ differences, which he believes are partially the result of genetic differences between ethnic groups. In the dissertation's acknowledgements, Richwine wrote that "no one was more influential" than AEI scholar Charles Murray, coauthor of the much-criticized book The Bell Curve, which argued that racial disparities in IQ are partially the result of genetic differences between races. After the Post broke the story about the dissertation, the Heritage Foundation distanced itself from Richwine's immigration reform study.

At the 2008 talk, Richwine said, "I do not believe that race is insurmountable, certainly not, but it definitely is a larger barrier today than it was for immigrants in the past simply because they are not from Europe." The 2008 AEI panel focused on a book by immigration reform opponent Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict limits on all immigration. Krikorian's book, The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal, began with Krikorian stating that the difference between modern immigration and immigration at the turn of the century "is not the characteristics of the newcomers but the characteristics of our society."

Richwine firmly disagreed with part of Krikorian's assessment. The "major difference," he said, was the race of the immigrants: "There are real differences between groups." He contended that today's nonwhite immigrants are dumber. "Race is different in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ," he said. "Decades of psychometric testing has indicated that at least in America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks. These are real differences, and they're not going to go away tomorrow, and for that reason we have to address them in our immigration discussions and our debates."

[Read the full article]

The Downton Abbey Exception and 4 Other Stupid Immigration Amendments

—By Adam Serwer

| Wed May. 8, 2013 7:42 AM PDT

Defying expectations, Congress is poised to take a serious shot at immigration reform. A bipartisan group of eight Senators has agreed on a bill. One of the GOP's brightest young stars, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), has linked his political future to passage of the bill, and so far managed to wade through a flood of harsh criticism from the right. When the Heritage Foundation, the most influential think-tank in the conservative movement, released a dubious study Monday alleging immigration reform would cost trillions of dollars, it was attacked by not only liberals but also conservatives who are supporting the immigration effort.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will be taking its first crack at the bill Thursday. Republicans opposed to reform have now turned to a time honored tradition of oppositional behavior in the Senate: Offering a whole bunch of amendments to slow down the process and. If they're lucky, they'll be able to slip in a poison pill amendment—a change so noxious that it makes the entire bill harder to pass.

How many amendments? Well, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is currently leading the pack with seventy-seven. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has proposed 49, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is bringing up the rear with 24.

Here are some of the worst and most random amendments proposed:

Eliminating the path to citizenship

The centerpiece of immigration reform is a long, arduous path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) doesn't want that to happen. So he proposed an amendment that would make all undocumented immigrants in the US ineligible for the path to citizenship outlined in the bill. If passed, this is the sort of poison pill that would effectively kill the reform bill.

Beef with South Korea

Grassley has had long-running beef with South Korea since it placed tough restrictions on imports from the United States over worries about mad cow disease in 2003. Grassley's stampede of amendments includes one that would prevent South Koreans from obtaining visas designed to steer foreign investors to the US until the East Asian country "fully removes age-based import restrictions on beef from the United States." Though South Korean restrictions on US beef had once ground imports to a halt, most of the restrictions have been lifted as the result of a free trade agreement. (The GOP is in hock to the US beef industry).

But who can I underpay to cut my grass or drive my limo?

It's apparently really hard to find good (cheap) help these days, so Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has a modest proposal: Let's allow unauthorized immigrants to work—but only if they're doing low-paid domestic service jobs. Lee's amendment would exempt "services performed by cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governessess, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, care-takers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use" from "prohibitions on unlawful employment of unauthorized aliens." Next: An amendment that would allow employers to feed said domestic workers stale cake.

No welfare for terrorists

You may have heard that story about how that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who are suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon, received public assistance. Sessions is graciously placating the conservatives for whom allegedly blowing up a crowd of innocent people wasn't enough of an outrage by proposing an amendment that would deny "terrorist aliens" welfare benefits. Some of you might be asking, "But didn't the Tsarnaevs receive public assistance before anyone knew they were terrorists?" Stop asking questions! Why do you love the terrorists so much?

Another welfare amendment (really!)

The immigration bill does not allow undocumented immigrants seeking legal status to receive welfare benefits. But that's not good enough for Sessions, who has proposed an amendment that would deny the path to citizenship to those deemed "likely" to receive "means-tested public benefits" at "any point in the future." If this sounds subjective and impossible to enforce, you're forgetting about the Department of Homeland Security's psychics.

All told there are now more than 300 proposed amendments to the bill, most of them from Republicans. (Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) has also proposed 24.) Many have been filed with the sole purpose of gumming up the works and making it harder to pass an immigration bill.

Sexual Assaults in Military Keep Rising—And Nearly 90 Percent Never Report It

—By Adam Serwer

| Wed May. 8, 2013 7:19 AM PDT

The number of servicemembers who reported being sexually assaulted rose consistently over the past four years, according to an internal Pentagon report released Tuesday, despite recent efforts by the Obama administration to address the problem. But because only a fraction of servicemembers ever report assaults to their superiors, the Pentagon also conducts an anonymous survey to estimate the true scope of the problem, and those reveal a much larger number: For 2012, for example, the report estimates that the real number servicemembers experiencing "unwanted sexual contact" is closer to 26,000, which means about 90 percent of servicemembers assaulted kept quiet about it. (The DoD data only provide estimates for 2006, 2010, and 2012.)

This problem has persisted for years—in 2008 then Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) wrote that women in the military were more likely to be raped by fellow servicemembers than killed by enemy fire. The news comes two days after the Air Force official charged with preventing sexual assault, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, was himself charged with sexual battery. The administration's nominee for vice commander of the Air Force Space Command is being held up in the Senate following revelations that she promoted an officer convicted of sexual assault.

The Pentagon report states that "[c]losing the gaps between prevalence and reporting will remain a key factor in determining success of our efforts." As you can see, so far they haven't made a tremendous amount of progress. Tuesday Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a new set of measures to improve the military's handling of sexual assault, saying that "we know we've got big problems. We know that. And we've addressed that, and we'll continue to address it."

Note: This chart is based on one presented in the secretary of defense's sexual assault prevention and response memo released by the Pentagon yesterday.

Gitmo Detainee Explains Why He's on Hunger Strike

—By Adam Serwer

| Sat May. 4, 2013 7:00 AM PDT

Obaydullah, a detainee at Gitmo who was first captured in Afghanistan in 2002, filed a declaration in federal court in March that was unsealed and posted by the national security blog Lawfare on Friday. The declaration goes into striking detail about the circumstances that Obaydullah (who goes by one name) says provoked the hunger strike at the detention camp, which began in February and now involves 100 out of the 166 remaining detainees, according to the Pentagon's count.

"In response to the dehumanizing searches, the confiscation of our personal items, and the desecration of the holy Quran, I and the men at Camp 6 and some at Camp 5, waged a hunger strike on Feburary 6 2013," the declaration reads. "But our strike continues because conditions have gotten worse, not better, and there is no hope that we will ever leave here."

The declaration corroborates the descriptions of Gitmo defense attorneys who have said that although the hunger strike began as a response to what the detainees saw as desecration of their holy books, it has now grown into a protest of the Obama administration's policy of indefinite detention. According to Obaydullah, conditions had improved until the February "shake down" that he says provoked the strike. In response, Obaydullah says, the guards began to interrupt detainees' prayers and moved detainees to more restrictive conditions. Access to recreational facilities was limited and, according to Obaydullah, camp authorities deliberately began to lower the temperature in Camp 6 to the point of "freezing." "All of these actions showed me and the other prisoners that camp authorities were treating us the way we were treated in the years under President Bush," Obaydullah writes.

In his declaration, Obaydullah hints at what the detainees would require to end the three-month protest. "We plan to remain on strike until we are treated with dignity, the guards stop trying to enforce old rules, our prayer and religion are respected, and our Qurans are handled with the care and sanctity required."

Obaydullah has been challenging his detention for years with little success. Although he maintains he was never a fighter for Al Qaeda or the Taliban, a federal judge concluded in 2010 that the evidence against him "unmistakably supports the conclusion that it is more likely than not that petitioner Obaydullah was in fact a member of an al Qaeda bomb cell committed to the destruction of U.S. and Allied forces," and was therefore lawfully detainable.

"I am losing all hope because I have been imprisoned at Guantanamo for almost 11 years now and I still do not know my fate," Obaydullah concludes.

Here's the full declaration:

Obaidullah Declaration (PDF)Obaidullah Declaration (Text)