#abusive management

[dekaydk]

Holy Toxic Fan Culture

Allowing other people a hint that you have an actual life will be punished.

This is disgusting.

[officialkur3]

Amazon

1. FEAR OF ABUSIVE MANAGEMENT AND DANGEROUS CONDITIONS

Amazon's management is known for being abusive, and the working conditions can be downright dangerous. Mistakes are not tolerated, and employees live in fear of being fired. Injuries are common, and lawsuits have been filed against the company.

2. GREED OVER EMPLOYEE WELL-BEING

Amazon's massive sales and gigantic profits are often prioritized over the well-being of its employees. The company's huge success has come at the cost of a miserable workforce that feels treated like slaves.

3. LOW EMPLOYEE RETENTION RATE

Amazon's low employee retention rate is a red flag. The toxic work environment, unfair performance-review system, and high injury rates contribute to quick burnout and high turnover.

4. GENDER BIAS AND DISCRIMINATION

Allegations of gender bias and discrimination have plagued Amazon. Women report few promotions and a culture of aggressive male-dominated management. Lawsuits have been filed alleging mistreatment and retaliation.

5. SURVEILLANCE AND PARANOIA AMONG DRIVERS

Amazon's delivery network relies on constant surveillance of drivers. Cameras monitor them constantly, leading to paranoia and discomfort. Some drivers have even reported having to pee in water bottles due to lack of restroom access.

6. UNFAIR PERFORMANCE REVIEW SYSTEM

Amazon's complex performance-review system is criticized as unfair. Managers may give bad reviews to good staff, and the company aims to get rid of a certain number of employees each year through unregretted attrition.

7. HIGH INJURY RATES IN WAREHOUSES

Injury rates at Amazon warehouses are four times higher than industry peers. The grueling work and high turnover contribute to a dangerous environment, leading to muscle and joint injuries.

8. UNIONIZATION EFFORTS AND EMPLOYEE ANGST

Nationwide unionization efforts among Amazon employees reflect the dissatisfaction with working conditions. Employee angst over low pay has reached crisis levels, driving attrition higher across senior ranks.

9. CONTROVERSIAL HIRING AND FIRING PRACTICES

Some Amazon managers have admitted to "hiring to fire" just to meet internal turnover goals. This controversial practice has led to further criticism of the company's ethics and treatment of employees.

10. A MIRAGE OF GREAT PAY AND BENEFITS

While Amazon offers attractive compensation packages, the reality often falls short. The stressful environment, long hours, and high attrition rates make the promise of great pay and benefits a mirage for many.

[faeriekit]

I think Alfred needs his own prompt 👻(dp x dc)

Alfred had died.

(It was a bit of a waste of time— he'd been scheduled to get the boys to and from their suit fitting at this time. Now here he was; languishing. Murdered. Sulking, even.)

(How frivolous.)

As a busy man with children (an adult child) to care for, a house to maintain, and a budget to supervise, Alfred's main goal was to return to Earth, obviously. If he left Master Bruce in charge of the dusting, the man would absolutely let the unused parts of the house go into disrepair. Too impatient, his ex-ward was.

The only problem was that in this green, nebulous, and gravity-free afterlife, there seemed to be only one way out— navigating through the individual worlds that the denizens of this world have molded around themselves, until he finds a being willing to grant his wish to return.

Alfred sighed, checked for the pistol at his hip and the rifle on his back, and marched straight upwards. Or. Well. Downwards. Actually... Never mind.

[nopanamaman]

What’s the deal with Tsar and Arthur?

Today we’ll look at the two most popular members of Sanya and Yura’s friend group, Tsar and Arthur, a.k.a. Anger Management. How did they meet? What’s their life like? And most importantly, why the hell are they so angsty?

Let’s start with the older one.

Arthur Sokolov

Joining the orphanage

Arthur was brought to the orphanage not long after being born. He never met any of his parents.

Growing up in a state-funded shelter meant developing a clear understanding of what kinds of behaviours will and won’t result in getting your shit kicked in. You can’t be too cocky, and you can’t be too weak. Follow the hierarchy, but don’t let your fear of elders show.

Arthur learned to navigate that little society well. He had earned respect among kids his own age and younger, and avoided being pushed around by the older teenagers too much. Less due to a noble heart and more because of being too proud to act like a doormat. 

However, that didn't make him immune to peer pressure.

Correctional psychiatry

Business trip.

Many low-end orphanages across the former USSR had been essentially transformed into incubators for future gang members. “Businessmen”, either by bribe or threat, came to these institutions to recruit impressionable children into their organisations. One such uncle visited Arthur’s foster home.

For kids like him, the course of action was simple:

misbehave;

get sent to a mental institution for corrective treatment;

sneak as many bottles of trihexyphenidyl as you can into your bag during your stay;

leave the hospital as normal;

transfer the trihexyphenidyl to a gang representative and get your paycheck.

Under that business model, Arthur became a frequent guest at psychiatric wards. Having witnessed their indifference and medical callousness firsthand, he had developed a massive disdain for all kinds of mental health professionals.

It started even before joining the gang, of course – way before. It’s hard not to foster a vendetta when you get thrown to the looney bin for any misstep. At first he tried to honestly convince the doctors working there that he was fine, but he eventually realised it was futile: they were always in on the punishment.

Hustling continues

Arthur and Ivan at 15 and 17 respectively.

As Arthur grew older, he got more deeply involved with the gang’s activities alongside other kids. This meant participating in transfers, standing watch during certain deals, acting as a “treasure man” (i.e. hiding drugs in agreed upon places for clients to pick up), and so on. Fights were frequent.

He knew it was a slippery slope, but getting out was not an option – not an easy one, at least. This was the period during which he grew close to Ivan, who was commonly assigned to work with Arthur and other children from their institute.

They bonded on the basis of wanting to leave the business, though for different reasons: most of all, Ivan didn’t want to disappoint his grandma.

Getting out

First meeting with Yura.

The sudden disbandment of the gang was a relief to both Ivan and Arthur. A major member got caught and ratted almost everyone out, except for the dozens of orphans involved. So while Ivan went to turn himself in, Arthur got to walk free.

Before going, Ivan suggested Arthur replace him at his pop’s car repair salon. The boy seemed to have a knack for fixing things, and the two had developed a trusting relationship over their time working together.

While everything was looking fine, Arthur still wanted to destroy all traces of his activities - even those that couldn’t reasonably be tracked down to him. This led to him encountering Yura. Despite the very rocky start of their acquaintance, they went on to hang out together pretty regularly.

As of today, Arthur continues to do part-time at the workshop alongside Ivan. Both are committed to never getting back into the criminal business. Unless you count Sanya's Dynamo. Which you shouldn't. Having experienced what actual gangs are like, Arthur finds it hard not to look down at the girl's little roleplay.

Tsar

Joining the orphanage

Before coming to the orphanage, Tsar lived with his grandma. She died when he was 6. Since his parents had lost their parental rights due to alcoholism a couple years prior, there was only one place for him to go.

Tsar had a very hard time adjusting to the rigid hierarchy of the foster home. He was lucky enough to catch Arthur's attention and, in a sense, got scooped under his wing. The boy disliked relying on the older kid too much, but was too weak to stand on his own.

Gang involvement

How come mom lets you have two trips to the mental ward

Since Arthur got dragged into gang activities earlier than Tsar, the younger kid felt jealous. He, like most other children, fully bought into the romanticised idea of criminal life that was pushed by the uncles visiting the orphanage.

But as years went on, he saw the toll it had begun to take on Arthur. Tsar had taken a couple of correctional trips to mental wards as well, though he'd never participated in any illegal schemes. Those times were bad enough - he couldn't imagine going there again and again on purpose.

By the time Tsar would be old enough to get recruited into the business, Arthur forbade him from it. The kid still wanted to join to prove his worth, to earn his share, to show his guts. But his trust and respect for Arthur were stronger.

As much as he hated the idea, he stuck to the sidelines.

Contact with parents

Teatime with family.

Tsar’s parents reached out to him a couple years after he was transferred to the orphanage. He could only meet with them under supervision up until he was 13 years old. Afterwards they were allowed private meetings.

Today, he occasionally comes to visit them at their apartment. They still drink, but to Tsar, they just seem quiet and pitiful. He usually lends them the pocket money he receives from the orphanage. He knows they won't return it.

Anger Management

Ural models are known for their incredible durability and a baffling number of switches.

Tsar found a creative release in music and wrote songs to vent his frustrations. The orphanage had an old acoustic guitar that he learned to play, but it got completely broken when the boy was 13. After Arthur joined the workshop, he bought a black Ural from Ivan’s dad for cheap, upgraded its port, and gifted it to Tsar.

As it turned out, Ivan’s dad was hopping from one band to another in the 80s-90s, so he was happy to accommodate the kids' creative endeavours. He allowed them to use the spare garage space to practise and even supplied an incomplete drum set.

Tsar begged Arthur to back him up with drums. The latter begrudgingly agreed to learn them, but ended up really enjoying hitting barrels with sticks. Right now their band has a tiny local following, mostly in the face of Sanya Kazarina.

Some notes

I remember sitting down and reading about actual orphanage experiences in the post-soviet space – it was eye-opening, but also gave me a lot of material to work with, as heartless as that probably sounds. A lot of things simply clicked into place.

I didn't go into too much detail here, but FYI, I've downplayed the severity of certain situations. Trauma aside, I'd say both Tsar and Arthur got quite lucky in the end.

[furiousgoldfish]

[thatswhatsushesaid]

psa that the day there are no jgy stans left on tumblr dot com is the day i am dead

but rest assured i'll go to my grave exactly as i lived: obnoxiously proclaiming to everyone within earshot how great lianfang-zun is. narratively, metaphorically, spiritually. sexually, too, like why limit myself. i like to keep my options open

[whetstonefires]

The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.

If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!

If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!

If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.

After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.

But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.

All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.

And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.

The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.

The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!

[that-ineffable-devil]

Listen, I love the Night Nurse as a character. I love Ruth Connell, period.

But when she stands there in Charles' memories and watches him get beaten with a belt and then takes the words he cried at his father to beat him down further "No, you can't make it better. You never made it better, then you died."

I have yet to forgive her for that. It is, without a doubt, one of the cruellest lines I've ever heard in film or television.

[ineffabells]

hey, you know what's a fun thought?

what if one day, pre-ascension, Mobei-Jun was beating up Shang Qinghua as usual, but this time when he threw him, SQH hit his head on a jutting out piece of rock or wall in just the right place

and instead of crawling onto his knees and doing his over-the-top wailing and begging for mercy routine that MBJ had come to expect, SQH just lay still.

and a dark pool of blood, impossibly big and horrifyingly still pouring, spread from skull, on the floor aroud him, soaking through his sunny, ink-stained an-ding robes,

as Mobei watched, a cold horror settling over him. and SQH didn't get up.

[capinejghafa]

Steve Blackman on being pressed for being abusive, then goes: I didn't see things that way... sir, obviously you're in a position of power why would you???

[pathetic-gamer]

[phoenixmetaphor]

next >>>

oct 1 - aqua ring

man why does the aqua ring gotta look like… that.

… i am trying something new this october, which is to just.. focus on one au. which isn’t to say every piece will be in the same au, but just that instead of agonizing over prompts, i can just keep developing one idea.

i am also doing a new au. i’m too invested in most of the others to do rushed drawtober pieces for them ���

so here we goooooooooooo.

see the tags if you want to know vaguely where this is going. we’ll talk more about it later.

(btw, i am DEFINITELY not doing comics every day all month. i am not doing comics every piece nor am i doing them every day. i mean… let’s be real, it’s me, we’re doing good if you get like…. 4 pieces out of me in october.)

[stevetwisp]

ZEE AND JINGLEBELL IN THE YEAR 2024

[repotting]

a pet peeve of mine is stuff proudly labelled vegan but it's farmed w slave labor. like how is that vegan then.

we made this without exploiting or harming any animals!!! (but the human children forced into dangerous and underpaid agricultural labour to make this product don't matter i guess???)

like how are you gonna try to sell me child abuse chocolate and tell me it's vegan like come on

[skuffypaw]

where’d you get those wounds, darkpaw?

[furiousgoldfish]

Attempting to dismiss abuse and 'not take it personally', doesn't take away from how it affects you; it makes it worse. If you're approaching each insult, degradation, threat and disrespect as if it was 'not meant seriously' and 'they only said it because they were upset/trying to help', that doesn't mean that you are now not suffering insults, degradation, threats and disrespect. You are. But you get convinced that it is on you to rationalize it, not take it seriously, dismiss it, believe it was not done personally, to try to see it from the abuser's side, to imagine what made them do it. Which means in practice, you are taking abuse and then on top of it accepting that it is your fault if it ever gets to you, if it ever hurts you or gets you upset, or scared, or threatened, or despised, or if it makes you feel worthless and ashamed.

And nobody is rationalizing it on purpose, rather we're shamed by the abusers for taking anything personally, for being affected by anything hurtful they do to us, they make us believe that any reaction we have is our fault, because we failed to dismiss it and endure it and recover from it instantly. They make us responsible for what they do to us, and how it affects us. Being shamed for 'failing to rationalize abuse' is a part of abuse.

Abuse is always personal, it's done to a person whose well being is not prioritized and valued, which is exactly why the abused person feels worthless and ashamed, they can tell they're not prioritized or valued in any way. But if then on top of it you're convinced that your perception is wrong, that you're faulty for being hurt by this, for protesting this, now you can't even vocalize what is wrong, out of fear for being shamed for having a reaction. Your attempts to dismiss and rationalize it don't mitigate the effects of it, you are still being disrespected, threatened, degraded, but now you're also too ashamed to protest, to say it's bothering you, to speak out and acknowledge that you are a person whose life experience matters, who doesn't just exist to take on others malice, sadism and hatred.

You can end up feeling even more alone, because you have to hide your reactions, and act like nothing is wrong. You still feel scared and anxious about all of the threats, you still feel humiliated, offended and upset by all of their insults and degradation, you still feel your personhood wither away because you are obviously not treated as a person, and you can feel it, but you can never say it. You can't believe your own senses and assume that you're wrong for feeling it, rather than the abusers being wrong for mistreating you. You're filled with anxiety of 'What if they're right? What if I am all of those things they keep saying about me? What if one day they act on their threats? What if my life is without value? What if something is deeply wrong with me and I shouldn't even exist?' regardless of whether you take these things personally or not. This is what abuse does to an individual who is powerless to fight back.

You can take all abuse personally. Anyone making you feel like this, forcing you to have these thoughts about yourself, is not treating you like a living, breathing, feeling human being, and your instincts are right to tell you that this is wrong, that you're being treated badly. There's no actual reason or justification for anyone to do this to you. Hurting you will not make anyone better, will not fix anyone's problems or make anyone's life better. The mere urge of another person to do this to you is abnormal and suggests something is wrong with their sense of right and wrong.