But it's just so American!

August 6, 2011 1:41 PM

AMC's Hell on Wheels is an upcoming series created by Joe and Tony Gayton, centered around the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Joe: "I think what a lot of people think of when they think about the Transcontinental Railroad is the contribution of the Chinese immigrants." "But, it’s just so American". So the show focuses on railroad construction from the East, and the Chinese laborers story? They "ended up getting excised".

Unable to flat out say something like "Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project" (a writer who adopted a Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for HBO films), the Gaytons stumbled through trying to explain it in any other way possible:

“And just, budget-wise and time-wise…we could really only concentrate on one side of [the railroad building], and that’s probably why we, you know, that’s why we chose the [emanating from the East Coast] Union Pacific as opposed to the [emanating from the West Coast] Central Pacific.”

“The genesis of the railroad started in the East,”

“It was Abraham Lincoln’s idea, and we’ve likened it to JFK, you know, saying, ‘We are going to make the we are going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade’.”

“And it was very similar. So it just seemed a good starting point.”

But, he promised, “The Central Pacific will be a hint in the show. I mean, we will know that they are out there, building.”

posted by cashman (68 comments total)

And that, dear readers, is termed "whitewashing".
posted by likeso at 1:46 PM on August 6, 2011 [25 favorites]

America is still taking advantage of Chinese workers, only now they're IN China and it's with the full cooperation of their own country's can't-call-it-Communist-so-can-we-call-it-Fascist? government.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:50 PM on August 6, 2011 [6 favorites]

What a shame; the story of the Chinese workers is so interesting. Why would you cut that out?
posted by Nelson at 1:54 PM on August 6, 2011 [4 favorites]

All the buzz on this show seems to suggest that it's a total unsalvageable wreck that's going to further drag AMC's reputation into the gutter.
posted by anazgnos at 1:56 PM on August 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

"The majority of the Union Pacific track was built by Irish laborers[17], and veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies," while "Central Pacific's grade was constructed primarily by many thousands of emigrant workers from China." (Wikipedia link)

The show focuses on the Union Pacific side, not the Central Pacific side. So the makers of the show didn't "excise" the Chinese laborers; they chose the half of the story in which the Chinese were not involved. FWIW, post-Civil War race relations are very much part of the show's focus -- just they chose the half of the railroad in which freed slaves were involved, not the half where Chinese immigrants were.

I'm more annoyed by the fact that the pilot is poorly-written and feels like an imitation of "Deadwood" with all the grit and vigor and awesomeness taken out.
posted by lewedswiver at 1:59 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

Well, at least they didn't film the story of Chinese laborers as played by white Hollywood actors, all with bad fake accents...

Seriously, though, I've never understood this. People want film and TV to take them to places they've never been -- since when is "it’s just so American, the idea of a tent city that packs up and moves, you know. And it’s violent, and it’s given to vice and gambling, but there’s churches there" (a.k.a. the same old Western narrative that's been told about three thousand times) more interesting than a whole new story about immigrants rising to one of our nation's greatest challenges amidst punishing conditions?
posted by vorfeed at 2:00 PM on August 6, 2011 [5 favorites]

China has a movie industry; maybe they can pony up the dough for a movie that shows the Chinese side of things?
posted by Renoroc at 2:04 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

Are there any Carradine brothers left?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:13 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

What needs also to be there: Abe Lincoln got the federal govt to fund, build this RR and that not only opened the West, but made Mississippi less important, and helped us to see the importance of getting the Indians out of the way of our expansion...the govt didn't even announce National Defense when this socialistic program got underway.:
"While President Lincoln built the world's most powerful armed forces, he put through an extraordinary program of economic measures, including:

ultra-protectionist tariffs which virtually forced into existence a new American steel industry;

government organization of railroad systems reaching across the wilderness to the Pacific Ocean;

the sharp upgrading of U.S. agriculture, by such methods as government-directed agricultural science, free land for farmers, creation of the Agriculture Department, and promotion of new farm machinery and cheap tools;

recruitment of immigrants, to rapidly increase population;

free higher education throughout the United States through the Land Grant College system;

reestablishing national control over banking, with cheap credit for productive purposes."

Not bad for a Republican!
posted by Postroad at 2:15 PM on August 6, 2011 [3 favorites]

The story of the Chinese immigrant workers in this country is an American story.
posted by IvoShandor at 2:16 PM on August 6, 2011 [40 favorites]

Yes it is. So is the story of the Irish immigrants who built much of the Union Pacific. Who, interestingly, were not considered white (at the time). Irish were treated as trash.
posted by Justinian at 2:20 PM on August 6, 2011 [7 favorites]

Holy shit, I hadn't heard about Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. WTF HBO.

And the AMC writers' excuse seems to be something like "it's too hard to talk accurately about the whole thing, so we just dropped the non-white side!" But oh, there is a "hint" of the Central Pacific. Well, gee, thank you so much, oh gracious writers.

Ugh. Fuck em.
posted by kmz at 2:23 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

With a title like Hell on Wheels, it's gotta be good!
posted by dobbs at 2:32 PM on August 6, 2011

The Chinese Canadian Railroad story is full of excitement, it has real potential as an adventure narrative--regardless of all the other justice issues, but mostly we get work like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o87MgkGAqeU
posted by PinkMoose at 2:39 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

Well, I'm sure a show so apparently bad you've all buried it near Wounded Knee site-unseen would have been greatly improved by additional subplots written by their apparently incompetent writers.
posted by yerfatma at 2:44 PM on August 6, 2011

I love how the distance and perspective afforded by time allows us to look back at the less glorious moments surrounding the creation of our great country and say, "What? Who? Yeah, fuck 'em."

It worked the first time, right?
posted by redspraypaint at 2:44 PM on August 6, 2011 [3 favorites]

I don't know if they've published an updated study since, but the Screen Actors Guild put out a report that showed in 2009, less than 4% of all roles in all productions - commercials, movies, TV, whatever - were played by people of Asian descent.

There's a severe under-representation of Asians and Asian-Americans in the media; this story is unsurprising but still problematic. A television series featuring a predominantly Asian cast that isn't about martial arts could be been an interesting and potentially lucrative prospect. I thought AMC was about bold, inventive programming, but apparently not.
posted by HostBryan at 2:51 PM on August 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

The other racial injustice is that Common is in it. Dude, stop acting.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:57 PM on August 6, 2011 [4 favorites]

For shame. I felt such a flash of excitement for half a second there, when I skimmed this post and thought AMC actually was making a show about Chinese immigrant railroad workers. That would have been so interesting! What is wrong with these people? I mean, it's been clear for a while now that AMC basically lucked into whatever reputation for quality and substance they acquired with Mad Men and Breaking Bad, but you'd think they would take a just little pride in it anyway.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 3:00 PM on August 6, 2011

If they wanted to do a series about railroads, they should've adapted Iron Council. Except they probably would have left out the Remade.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 3:24 PM on August 6, 2011 [5 favorites]

This is why I've never liked Hamlet. You can pretend it's a work of art, but it doesn't even touch on Iceland's struggle to throw off the Danish chains. What a yoke.
posted by yerfatma at 3:31 PM on August 6, 2011 [5 favorites]

“One of the things that really caught me is, just, it’s just so American, the idea of a tent city that packs up and moves, you know. And it’s violent, and it’s given to vice and gambling, but there’s churches there.”

And horseshit. Lots of horseshit.
posted by homunculus at 3:49 PM on August 6, 2011 [6 favorites]

You don't think there's a certain irony in everybody bitching that this isn't a story about Chinese laborers building the railroad because obviously the first thing everyone thinks of when you say "transcontinental railroad" is Chinese laborers and how their valuable contributions have been utterly expunged from history and never acknowledged?
posted by Naberius at 4:16 PM on August 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

You mean that there were other laborers besides the Chinese laborers? Cuz the Chinese ones are the only ones I've heard about.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:23 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

Actually, didn't pa on little house on the prarie work on the railroad for awhile? Him and that guy with the beard. I've heard of them.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:25 PM on August 6, 2011

"I think what a lot of people think of when they think about the Transcontinental Railroad is the contribution of the Chinese immigrants."

I know I know more about the Chinese railway laborers than the Irish ones, so they may be doing a service here.

Of course, were it up to me I'd have both stories being told and ending with them meeting up, but since I thought of it so it's probably the hack way to do it.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:40 PM on August 6, 2011

So is the story of the Irish immigrants who built much of the Union Pacific. Who, interestingly, were not considered white (at the time).

It's interesting, but it's not true. There was a flurry of scholarship in the early '90s about how the Irish weren't white, because there's a lot of evidence that the Irish were discussed in ways that depicted them as racially inferior. But then someone realized that white was a legal category. It's all over things like census documents and naturalization records. (And it was vital for naturalization records, because until 1870 only white people could become naturalized US citizens. After 1870, only white people and people of African descent could. Asian people were formally "aliens ineligible for citizenship," a situation that didn't change until after World War II. It really mattered that Irish people were classified as white and Chinese people weren't.) I've looked at an awful lot of census records for nineteenth-century Irish immigrants, and they're always described as white.

I feel like so much of American history is told from the perspective of the east coast that it would have been much more interesting and novel to deal with the west-moving-east side of things, rather than the same old westward expansion narrative. And part of what makes that interesting is that the immigration and labor stories are different. But I'm not sure that I'm naive enough to think that a series with a predominately-Asian cast would get greenlit. I don't know if I think people would have watched it if it did. But I think in general Hollywood is probably more timid than audiences are.

posted by craichead at 5:45 PM on August 6, 2011 [15 favorites]

Aargh. First paragraph above is a quote. The rest of it is mine.
posted by craichead at 5:46 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

NO! NO! NO! You are all wrong. I have been to the Golden Spike park in UT. and the nice man who dressed up like an engineer(white, middle aged.) Would have told my scout troop about the sacrifice and the role of Chinese immigrant workers.
posted by hot_monster at 6:22 PM on August 6, 2011 [3 favorites]

You don't think there's a certain irony in everybody bitching that this isn't a story about Chinese laborers building the railroad because obviously the first thing everyone thinks of when you say "transcontinental railroad" is Chinese laborers and how their valuable contributions have been utterly expunged from history and never acknowledged?

I don't understand this comment.
posted by sweetkid at 6:39 PM on August 6, 2011

If they had been utterly expunged from history and never acknowledged, how could they be the first thing everyone thinks of when you say "transcontinental railroad"?
posted by carping demon at 6:49 PM on August 6, 2011 [3 favorites]

Are there any Carradine brothers left?

Keith was just in Cowboys and Aliens. Playing a Shaolin monk trained by Venusians to ...

Aw, I'm kidding. He played a sheriff.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 6:51 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

I've looked at an awful lot of census records for nineteenth-century Irish immigrants, and they're always described as white.

Huh. So the "Irish weren't considered white" thing was scholars looking at the types of discrimination the Irish suffered and the derogatory language directed at them and coming to the conclusion that they couldn't, therefore, have been considered white because white people couldn't be treated that way? That in itself seems laden with all kinds of icky assumptions on the part of the people who popularized the Irish != white thing.
posted by Justinian at 6:54 PM on August 6, 2011

(And by "couldn't be treated that way" I mean they must have assumed that white people wouldn't treat other white people that way, only y'know those other people).
posted by Justinian at 6:55 PM on August 6, 2011

Christ people, take some patent Laudanum and calm the hell down.

Hell on Wheels is kind of a giveaway as to the setting of this story - a rolling city of bars and whorehouses on the Union Pacific. The Union Pacific was built mostly by micks so that the cast is going to look kinda mickish.

It's not whitewashing, it's not ethnic cleansing, it's not a disgrace or anything horrible. The Chinese story is pretty damned well known and they're not retelling it with white people subbed in.

Man, you guys. Do you go through daily life ready to launch on warning?
posted by codswallop at 6:56 PM on August 6, 2011 [12 favorites]

So the "Irish weren't considered white" thing was scholars looking at the types of discrimination the Irish suffered and the derogatory language directed at them and coming to the conclusion that they couldn't, therefore, have been considered white because white people couldn't be treated that way?

Maybe this has to do with the difference between the legal category of "white" and the social category of "white"? Hispanic and Latino Americans are often counted as "white" today, for instance, even though they may or may not identify as such.
posted by vorfeed at 7:08 PM on August 6, 2011 [3 favorites]

So the "Irish weren't considered white" thing was scholars looking at the types of discrimination the Irish suffered and the derogatory language directed at them and coming to the conclusion that they couldn't, therefore, have been considered white because white people couldn't be treated that way?

It's not quite that bad. They looked at a certain kind of source: basically things like literature and newspapers and cartoons. In those sources, there's a lot of stuff that describes the Irish as possessing a lot of innate, inherited characteristics that make them inferior to other white Americans. They describe Irishness as a race. (That, it turns out, has to do with the way that "race" was used in the 19th century, which is more akin to what we'd call ethnicity.) Some of those sources explicitly say that Irish people are like black people. So the Irish weren't white! They just didn't focus on the kind of sources that showed that the Irish were white, because they were cultural historians and didn't look at boring legal and government documents.
posted by craichead at 7:10 PM on August 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

Maybe this has to do with the difference between the legal category of "white" and the social category of "white"?

It has to do with a conflation of the idea of being racialized with the idea of being non-white: the Irish were racialized, but that doesn't mean they weren't white. It also reflects some ignorance about the power that the legal category "white" had in 19th century America. Modern Americans think of race as fundamentally a social category, and that wasn't really how it worked in 19th century America. That's particularly true for immigrants, because the ability to become a US citizen gave immigrant groups, and particularly the Irish, really important opportunities.

I don't think it's directly equivalent to Latinos today. That has to do with ambiguity about who is white. There wasn't any ambiguity about whether the Irish were white. Everyone would have agreed that they were. The ambiguity is that being white meant something different in the 19th century than it does today.
posted by craichead at 7:36 PM on August 6, 2011 [6 favorites]

Do you go through daily life ready to launch on warning?

that's what she said (my ethnic studies professor)
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 8:09 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

All the buzz on this show seems to suggest that it's a total unsalvageable wreck

Well, you know what they say about the ability of train wrecks to attract audiences...
posted by ShutterBun at 9:02 PM on August 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

It is indeed unfortunate that the Chinese laborers' story got cut.

However, what threw me was Joe's statement that "I think what a lot of people think of when they think about the Transcontinental Railroad is the contribution of the Chinese immigrants." Because the Irish and black laborers get a lot of play too, to the point that I'm wondering whether you can make a claim that any one group gets more press. (It's the Irish I think of first, but I chalk that up to them being my peeps so I just have a Pavlovian thing.)

Which actually makes it all the worse that you'd exclude one particular group.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:29 PM on August 6, 2011

If I ever overcome my self-loathing, I have a comic book proposal for 2001AD. It's an Old West re-invention of their most cherished characters.

Sinister and Dexter? An Irishman and a Puerto Rican bare-knuckle boxer cavalcade! Nikolai Dante is a fur trader from Oregon who runs the company store. Officer Dredd is a bobby exiled from London for excessive harshness, who finds his truncheon is more than welcome on a Railroad Town's streets. Red Fang? He was born here, he will fight for his right to be here. With Kung Fu? No. that's for rich, idiot sons of wealthy fathers. He defends his own from the Anti-Chinese brigades with dynamite and a hammer...

... and the townsfolk need Red Fang most of all when the Alphabetical Brothers come to town.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:34 PM on August 6, 2011

A golden spike would've made a good ending to AMC's The Killing.
posted by box at 10:01 PM on August 6, 2011

Which actually makes it all the worse that you'd exclude one particular group.

I think there's a difference between "excluding" and simply "not including."
posted by ShutterBun at 10:23 PM on August 6, 2011

We Don't Get To Watch The Trains by Stephen Yerkey.

At least the Robber Barons of old left trains in their wakes.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 1:35 AM on August 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

“And people asked us if we were insane, if we were trying to get both of the stories -- service both of the stories -- in a one-hour pilot. So they ended up getting excised.”

From the pilot. Maybe they'll be more than a "hint" in the series proper. Here's hoping.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 4:37 AM on August 7, 2011

The mere fact that these buffoons didn't call their project Hell on Rails is reason enough to dismiss them.
posted by waxbanks at 5:29 AM on August 7, 2011

Of course, were it up to me I'd have both stories being told and ending with them meeting up, but since I thought of it so it's probably the hack way to do it.

Aaaaaand that's why you don't buy shows for a cable network.
posted by waxbanks at 5:35 AM on August 7, 2011

If they had been utterly expunged from history and never acknowledged, how could they be the first thing everyone thinks of when you say "transcontinental railroad"?

Indeed. That's the bit I found ironic...
posted by Naberius at 6:03 AM on August 7, 2011

craichead - thank you very much for your comments clarifying the Irish/race issue. I've always thought of it as a heirarchy (whereby Anglos would have seen themselves as the top, Irish below them but African Americans well below the Irish) - particularly as the stereotyping of the Irish in England in the 16th/17th century was as being a couple hundred years behind in development, but black Africans as being much more undeveloped. But it seems like in the 19th century in the US, the legal categories fixated
on the broad categories, while culturally there were gradations within those legal definitions (thus "white" includes the English/British race, the German race, the Italian race, etc, while Asian included the Chinese race, Japanese race, etc - all of which had different innate racial characteristics if you are a 19th cen thinker).

But I'm curious about something - How much do you think the stereotyping/disregard of the Irish in the 19th century was ethnic, and how much of it was religious (Protestant Anglos & Scots reacting to their Catholocism)? In the 17th century, that is the main division, though ideas about them being less developed were beginning to be developed (in tandem with the colonial project there).
posted by jb at 6:04 AM on August 7, 2011

So, it's a show on AMC that's only telling half the story? I blame Don Draper.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:59 AM on August 7, 2011

But it seems like in the 19th century in the US, the legal categories fixated on the broad categories, while culturally there were gradations within those legal definitions (thus "white" includes the English/British race, the German race, the Italian race, etc, while Asian included the Chinese race, Japanese race, etc - all of which had different innate racial characteristics if you are a 19th cen thinker).

That's exactly right.

But I'm curious about something - How much do you think the stereotyping/disregard of the Irish in the 19th century was ethnic, and how much of it was religious (Protestant Anglos & Scots reacting to their Catholocism)?

That's actually a debate among historians. The short answer is that it's hard to separate the two, at least starting in the mid-19th century, when Protestant Irish-Americans decided they were "Scotch-Irish" and thus a completely different kind of person from Irish-Irish people. From then on out, when people said "Irish," they usually meant Irish Catholics. In the mid-19th century, there was some debate about whether the Irish were depraved because they were Catholic or Catholic because they were depraved. By the late 19th century, ideas about heredity were much more in vogue, and elite Americans tended to believe that the Irish were the way they were because of innate characteristics, not because of environmental factors like religion. I don't think there's been a ton of work done on the belief system of non-elite nativists, but my hunch would be that in the late 19th century they were more likely to blame religion and less likely to blame heredity. By around 1900, specifically anti-Irish prejudice was declining a lot, although there was still a lot of anti-Catholic prejudice in large parts of the country.
posted by craichead at 8:16 AM on August 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think there's a difference between "excluding" and simply "not including."

"Not including" is pretty much the definition of "excluding".
posted by IvoShandor at 9:32 AM on August 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

whatever reputation for quality and substance they acquired with Mad Men

I dunno, Mad Men's decision to mostly ignore black characters aligns pretty closely with this decision to ignore Chinese characters. AMC's reputation, on that score anyway, survives intact.
posted by mediareport at 10:27 AM on August 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

"Not including" is pretty much the definition of "excluding".

Is "not liking" the same as "disliking"?
posted by ShutterBun at 10:50 AM on August 7, 2011

Is inclusion/exclusion a binary condition?
posted by box at 11:35 AM on August 7, 2011

Is inclusion/exclusion a binary condition?

Jebus, no. It's the same thing.

Is "not liking" the same as "disliking"?

I know you think you're being clever, but, what?
posted by IvoShandor at 7:31 PM on August 7, 2011

not including and excluding that is... sorry, misread that...
posted by IvoShandor at 7:32 PM on August 7, 2011

There's an excellent BBC Drama/Documentary on the building the Transcontinental Railroad, the sixth episode in the 7 Wonders of the Industrial World series
posted by das1969 at 4:32 AM on August 8, 2011

I think there's a difference between "excluding" and simply "not including."

What is it?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:28 AM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

If I pour myself a bowl of Cheerios, I'm making myself a meal which does not include mayonnaise. If I order a sandwich at subway or whatever and tell the sandwich person to hold the mayo, I'm excluding mayonnaise. At least that's the distinction I would make.

It's exactly the same distinction many atheists make between "not believing in" and "disbelieving".
posted by Justinian at 11:06 AM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Justinian has pretty much explained it (though I admit I'm pretty surprised there were so many who needed it.)

A story can't be about "everything." Especially regarding large, epic historical pieces, one has to focus on the story being told.

A movie like "Saving Private Ryan" did not "exclude" the holocaust, it simply didn't include it (except for a few passing references to Nazi oppression of Jews.) It also didn't include the stories of minority combat units, Japanese internment, the French Resistance, or race riots in the United States. (though come to think of it, if you figure in "Schindler's List" and "1941," Spielberg has covered an awful lot of those topics)
posted by ShutterBun at 9:21 AM on August 9, 2011

Shutterbun, I don't think some of us needed the term defined in and of itself, we just needed to know the definition others were using in relation to this project.

I mean, yeah, Saving Private Ryan didn't get into the Holocaust, but "World War II" is a much more complex topic than "the Transcontinental Railroad," so I'm still not sure why some are making the distinction between "deliberately excluding" and "impartially not including."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:36 AM on August 9, 2011

I mostly agree with that, ShutterBun. But you can't really deny that there is a pattern to which stories get told and which get ignored, and this particular choice about which story to tell fits in with that larger pattern.
posted by craichead at 9:38 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

But you can't really deny that there is a pattern to which stories get told and which get ignored, and this particular choice about which story to tell fits in with that larger pattern.

Exactly. Also, the example:

If I pour myself a bowl of Cheerios, I'm making myself a meal which does not include mayonnaise. If I order a sandwich at subway or whatever and tell the sandwich person to hold the mayo, I'm excluding mayonnaise.

This would definitely fall under the later case of exclusion, since the creators themselves say everyone expects it to be included. If you went to mcdonalds to get a hamburger, and they gave you all the toppings and the patties and no bread, you'd be shocked. If you then went to burger king and asked for a hamburger and they gave you a couple of patties, lettuce tomato and no bread, you'd wonder what the deal was. So you go to Wendys and then the same thing happens.

Why do people keep excluding the bread? It is pretty much assumed that a hamburger includes bread, or if you want to get technical, say they kept not including the bottom bun or something.

The point is, the creators themselves are saying "We knew everyone would wonder why there was no mention of Nike in a story about shoes professional basketball players wear....but the Nikes just got excised". And then to craichead's point, if that kept happening again and again, it would become kind of evident what was going on.
posted by cashman at 10:56 AM on August 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

What the hell are you people talking about?
posted by IvoShandor at 11:11 AM on August 9, 2011

Ivo, I think the issue is thus:

"The creators of this project suck because they left out the Chinese laborers."
"They didn't leave out the Chinese workers, they...left out the Chinese laborers."

And then it turned into a discussion about the difference.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:14 AM on August 9, 2011

This would definitely fall under the later case of exclusion

Possibly; I was just explaining what I saw as the distinction between not including and excluding. I admit I'm not heavily invested in which definition this particular case meets given that the result is the same either way.
posted by Justinian at 2:27 PM on August 9, 2011