If it makes you feel any better, the “weak-knee’d / fears of saying dopey stuff around an author” stuff has not disappeared for me. I actually stood in line at the Fitzgerald theater a few years ago with tons of kids who were clutching their copies of POLAR EXPRESS waiting to see Chris van Allsburg. They had restricted each person to a single book, so I brought my first edition of THE GARDEN OF ABDUL GASAZI which was published in 1979. I never did come up with anything brilliant to say. He signed. I said “thanks” and walked away. Sigh.

I’m kind of tempted to reread Counterpoint now. Unfortunately I don’t tend to recall plot developments very well for any book, but I think he may have had a point, in that the main character begins the book with “y’know, I’d like to do this crazy thing, because he’s a terrible person” and the following majority – and focus – of the book really is the more sane friend talking him down from that. But, as I say, who can remember these things? Maybe that was the plot for Watership Down.

That is, I take “person Y is convincing person Z of proposition X” to mean that two people are discussing X and NOT X, and the burden of proof rests primarily with X.

But, if two people are discussing the relative merits of X and NOT X, then it’s natural to see burden of proof as resting on the person arguing for the less instinctively obvious position.

In this case, that position is clearly “Hey, I think killing the president might be a cool thing to do.” So, the burden of proof rests with this argument. Which means that we say “this person is convincing this other person that it might be cool to kill someone,” rather than the other way around.