response 267 of 293:

Dec 20 04:33 UTC 2003

Re #239:  Jared Diamond opines that one of the prerequisites for
success of a society is how well it evaluates, improves and
incorporates worthwhile new ideas and inventions - regardless of
where they come from.

Islamic societies are strongly xenophobic and do a poor job of
even understanding others.  (The ancient Islamic scholars are
rightly praised for helping to preserve ancient Greek writings
in medicine and philosophy, but what most people don't realize
is that the works of great Greek playwrights were lost because
those same scholars did not see such art as useful enough to
copy, let alone translate.)

The failure of Islamic societies today is a direct consequence
of their "not-invented-here" syndrome combined with a broad
society-wide fundamentalism worse than the Amish.