On Our Virtual Route 66 This Week: On Our World

Welcome to September here in the Daily Outsider.

Our team has decided to dedicate this property to the alternative media as we present thoughts courtesy of the Electronic Intifada, Jacobin, Palestine Chronicles, Breaking the Silence, and how to beat Project 2025 with Progress 2025.

We look forward to the continued privilege to serve.

introducing

Progress 2025:

Solutions for Democracy

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, progressives across the United States are sounding the alarm over a right-wing agenda known as Project 2025.

The 922-page document crafted by the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank, offers a concrete transition plan for a future conservative presidential administration. Its regressive agenda intends to decimate reproductive and LGBTQ rights, undermine racial justice, crush environmental protections, and privatize government services in favor of corporations and profit.

Concerned constituents are warning about the dangers of Project 2025, and have called out the lack of a progressive counter-agenda designed to improve conditions for and safeguard the rights of all people.

But the truth is that communities across the country have already been laying the groundwork for a collective, compassionate future. And for nearly 30 years, YES! has been reporting on solutions that can make this progressive vision a reality.

That’s why we’ve launched Progress 2025: Solutions for Democracy, a hub of original solutions journalism that offers a grassroots, collective vision for how we can make the world we want to live in politically possible.

Regardless of who is elected president this November, the U.S. will continue to grapple with its long legacy of violence, exploitation, colonialism, and enslavement, both at home and abroad. But Progress 2025 expands the framework of what is possible—freeing our collective imagination from the limited solutions that politicians offer.

Every week, we’ll feature new stories that show how a better world is within reach and invite everyone to tap into one of the strongest resources we have to obtaining it: each other.

with new stories weekly on

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Colonialism and Sovereignty

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Stay up-to-date with our coverage at progress2025.org.

Soldiers’ testimonies we received and were published by Haaretz last week as part of the jaw-dropping investigation substantiate previous reports regarding the IDF's use of Palestinians civilians as human shields. This practice can’t be reduced to a few isolated incidents, nor is it about a commander acting on a whim. The testimonies make it clear that it’s both systemic and systematic to how the IDF is fighting in Gaza.

This latest variation on the use of human shields has been happening since the first month of the ground invasion, in different parts of the Gaza Strip, and is being carried out by a wide variety of units.

Many displaced Palestinians were coerced into performing this horrific task. Some were taken from the humanitarian corridor to IDF units around the Strip with the sole purpose of having their lives risked in order to protect the soldiers.

Most of them were adult men, but as one soldier testified, "There were times when really old people were made to go into houses." Another soldier said that in a different case they even sent a 16-year-old teen. They were told: “They are Gazans, use them as human shields.”

They are sent into potentially booby-trapped houses or tunnels, usually dressed in IDF uniforms, handcuffed, and sometimes with a camera attached to them. "They simply sent him in and he mapped it out for the commanders, with the brigade commander watching on the outside."

“In the end a 16-year-old kid is sitting there handcuffed inside the house with his eyes covered," a soldier explained. "The soldiers needed to help him go to the bathroom or feed him. It wasn't an incident that begins and ends with his entering the houses and tunnels.”

Some soldiers were told, "Our lives are more important than their lives." Others were told that Palestinians were needed to replace killed or discharged dogs from the canine unit that had filled the same purpose. The dehumanization needed to justify such a policy is astonishing.

What happens to those Palestinians once the army is done using them, a day or even a week later? They were simply released. "Then we finally realized that these weren't really terrorists but civilians who were taken especially for these operations," one soldier said.

The speed with which the most horrifying acts become routine – from the moment we as a society tell ourselves that "there are no innocents in Gaza" is frightening. These kinds of slogans, especially since October 7th, create a reality in which civilians pay the highest price.

Those who’ve heard the testimonies of IDF soldiers or Palestinians from previous rounds in Gaza or from decades of corrupting occupation know that this moral deterioration and dehumanization did not begin in recent months, but it certainly has accelerated.

According to a source who spoke to Haaretz, the IDF's Chief of Staff knew this was taking place. Just like the use of torture in Sde Teiman: everyone knew, from those who initiated it, to those who stayed silent and let it happen – from the top brass to the rank and file.

And just like in the case of tortured Palestinian detainees, Palestinians’ testimonies on the use of human shields have been out there for a long time. Al Jazeera even published footage. And yet it was easy for many, especially in Israel, to brush them aside and cast doubt.

"They know that it's not a one-time incident of a young and stupid company commander who decides on his own to take somebody" explained one of the soldiers. The use of human shields has become an integral part of how the IDF fights in Gaza.

Click to read the full investigation in Haaretz

Click to read more in The Guardian

Water wars, oil wars, even lithium wars — as the climate crisis intensifies and the global population swells, we are often told that our future will be marked by a frightening scramble for natural resources.

“Increased competition over scarce resources is likely to contribute to internal tensions within countries, as well as external tensions between countries,” warned the Pentagon in 2021.

For Episode #8 of “The International,” a world-spanning video series brought to you by Jacobin and the Progressive International, renowned economist Richard D. Wolff asks: Is it true? Are we really doomed to a Mad Max–style future of scarcity, competition, and violence? Or is there another way?

Click here to watch