Peer review happens the following way: editor gets manuscript, if it passes first cut (it's not obviously crazy) sends to three elder scholars in the (hopefully) appropriate subfield, they send it back after about 3 months with snarky comments based on cutting edge work their advisors did done 10-20 years previous, rinse repeat In the social sciences, it takes about 2 years from submission to paper publication.

In the pre-internet days, peer review like this prevented some bullshit from wasting the relatively scarce resources used by paper / USPS distribution and storage. Today it is just goofy, and only serves as a weird sort of evaluation procedure of scholars who rack up "scholarship points" just like some weird game of monopoly.

What about all the crap that gets "published" electronically, you ask? Almost by definition a "subfield" is a collection of people able to evaluate each other's work; if everybody in a subfield gets emails when a new paper is available, they ALL evaluate it via the internet (chat/ email/ etc), and they are all peers, and we see the old school scholarly distribution system to be parasitic ...

.... except there is no other way to rack up "scholarship points", so people continue to submit to the old school journals with their crusty old reviewers and their bullshit.

There's some truth to what you say, but I think it's a little over-cynical. I know the biology/chemistry world so that's all I can speak on. In bio/chem the peer review system has flaws, but it's largely effective, IMHO. I've never seen a paper take longer than 6 months from submission to publication (I've published 22 papers) and the majority take ~3 months. There are bad reviewers out there that are unscrupulous, lazy, or incompetent... but there are also plenty of good ones and a good editor can tell them apart and adjudicate appropriately.

As to the purpose of peer review and whether it's still needed: Biology/chemistry is huge and there are probably 100-200 journals that each publish ~50 papers/month that are potentially relevant to my work. I skim them all (and use e-mail alerts to notify me of anything especially relevant) but I certainly don't have time to read them all with sufficient depth to be critical. As such, I rely on editors and reviewers to pre-screen papers and only let the highest quality research into the most-prestigious journals. The system is, of course, flawed in many ways... but, if nothing else, the competitive-ness of the top-journals "keeps the riff-raff out". With the exception of articles that are directly relevant to me, I only take a close look at papers that appear in the top ~5 journals because most of the lower-tier journals are pretty boring. My behavior is pretty typical, from what I've seen in my field.

In a perfect world I'd have enough time to evaluate everything on it's own merit, but I don't (no-one does). But if a paper has made it into a good-to-great journal, that at least means that (a) an editor thought it was interesting and (b) three or four respected scientists read it carefully and thought it was pretty good. As you pointed out, there are lots of places where this system can err, but overall it does a pretty good job and serves my needs well. It's sort of like the point-system on HN: good comments sometimes get missed, and bad comments sometimes get up-voted... but overall it's a pretty effective way to help people separate the interesting from the banal or trivial.

Bio / Chem seems better than social sciences. That doesn't really surprise me, unfortunately, and is possibly due to the actual verifiability and lack of ideological baggage in hard sciences.

It's not misquote, it's paraphrase.

There's a fairly new term for this: snowclone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone

No, to paraphrase is to summarize or re-word [1]. I changed the meaning (from democracy to peer-review [2]). I'm not sure misquote was the best word-choice, but I definitely wasn't paraphrasing.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraphrase

[2] "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”" -- Winston Churchill

If you google "to paraphrase Winston Churchill", you hit the figure of speech that you've used. It's a pretty common turn of (para)phrase.

PS: Don't rely too much on dictionary.com, it's not the best. E.g. the New Oxford American Dictionary correctly gives the second meaning of "paraphrase: a rewording of something written or spoken by someone else".

It's a common phrase because it's meant to be funny. The word "paraphrase" is being used ironically

You can say what you want to say, since it's original, and say, "with apologies to Winston Churchill."