Nothing Personal

I don't know about the rest of the former British colonies, but Canada and Australia are politically independent, yet they still recognize the Queen of England as their queen. That's what's called a "personal union". (Funny the things you stumble across on Wiki while looking up something else.) England and Scotland were like that before they merged into one country. King James I was the king of both Scotland and England because Queen Elizabeth I died childless and James was her closest living relative. James wanted to unite the two countries politically, but he couldn't get either parliament to agree during his reign. After he died, however, they did agree and the two countries became one. There is also something called the "British Commonwealth", but I think that's just a free trade agreement.

In order to kill a person with a sword or an axe you've got to be personally mad at him. With a gun, not so much, and with bombs or artillery, even less. I don't know what's worse, being so angry that you can hack somebody to death while looking him in the eye, or dispassionately pushing a button that causes the death of millions of people who you don't know. Well, you can only kill them one at a time with the sword, while weapons of mass destruction cause mass destruction. There's nothing personal about it, the button pusher is just doing his job, but the effects of him doing his job are certainly more devastating than the swordsman with blood lust in his eye. Nevertheless, I'd rather be marooned on an island with the button pusher than the swordsman. You never know when the swordsman is going to flip out and start hacking on you, but the button pusher is not likely to blow up the island that he needs as much as you do.

People weren't worried that the crossbow was going to bring the world to an end, they were worried that it was going to make warfare so unpleasant that nobody would want to do it anymore. You might think that would be a good thing, but not if you're one of the soldiers or knights that's going to be put out of a job. There weren't a lot of good paying jobs in those days, most people were either farmers or fighters. I doubt that most of the fighters wanted to become farmers, except maybe after they accumulated enough loot to be able to retire on a nice country estate where they could be a gentleman farmer, which means the guy who gets to boss the other farmers around. Anyway, they needn't have worried, warfare certainly did not go out of fashion as predicted.

You've got me all wrong, Uncle Ken. I don't dislike people who are different than me, I dislike people who outnumber me. One Black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or gay guy living next door to me is no threat to me. It's when a whole mob of them get together and over run the neighborhood that they become a threat to me. I can either make friends or avoid contact with one guy, but I can't do that with a nameless, faceless horde that could easily trample me by accident even if they aren't mad enough to kill me on purpose. So far we don't have any thing like that around here, but you never know. If it can happen on television, it can  happen anywhere.