Cogito ego sum?

So many questions, such is the blessing of cognizance, or curse, depend on relativity I suppose. And who can't like Arnold? He was the terminator.

The answer to them all is "42".

The questions are far more important than the answers.

The most famous scientists and philosophers in history are not remembered because of the answers they came up with. They are famous for asking the questions no one else had properly posed, and for the further questions those questions led to.

Nietzsche is all too often misunderstood. Many think of his writing as dark and depressing, but in reality it's not. It's just that too many other philosophies are about running away from your problems, and that is mistaken for being a positive thing. Nietzsche disagreed. Confront your problems with everything you have, and deal with the fact that the world is not fair. The state of nihilism is not an end but a passageway one has to crawl through in order to come out free on the other side.

Well, ûbermensch has nothing to do with arian supremacy.

Hitler and his henchmen stole alot of stuff -- they knew that in order to build a new world order, they had to conjure up and reuse old images and ideas in order to build a mythology around their politics. They stole alot of stuff from the Roman era and various world religions -- the sun symbol (swastika) is probably the first that springs to peoples' minds. It is now almost perfectly synonymous with Evil.

There was other stuff way more on acid, like the idea that the arian were the lost race of Atlantis...

Without a strong and flashy mythology, nazism wouldn't have been as effective as it was. There had to be links to the past that "proved" the ideology right. Pieces of Nietzsche's philosophy were hijacked and abused in a similar manner as the swastika. Torn out of their original context.

What I read from the Nietzschean ûbermench is a vision of humankind's potentiality. We were once apes and now we are humans, but we can be much more. I know this instantly brings up images of eugenics programs and holocaust...but that is because this branch of thought has become as tainted by nazi abuse as the once-innocent sun-symbol has.

Nietzsche himself never touched the idea of ethnic cleansing, and one might say he was naive for not seeing the potential for this twisted effect to rise from the idea that we can evolve further as a species...but the thing is (as I read it), with the ûbermensch comes also infinite responsibility. The ûbermensch has no superstitions to blame for her own failures, nor a promise of a better life after death to keep her from acting in the here and now, nor any ideals that have greater value than human life and thus no excuse at all to do evil for the sake of a "higher good". The Nietzschean ûbermensch in its original realization could never have allowed a Holocaust to happen.

Perhaps the ûbermensch could be seen as the infinitely self-aware, pragmatic humanist, and nazis were anything but that.

I'd definitely recommend Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It's a dramatized piece and where both the übermensch concept and "God is dead" comes from. It might be a good idea to find a version with foreword and insights from experts on his writing.

I like all your questions...especially the Bush one. I will admit I voted for him, but I believe in second chances also....lol. I couldn't help but laugh at that.