awwjdInvesting in the stock market has nothing to do with being admirable. Shorting is not long term. So if your definition is buy and hold forever then shorting is not for you.
Most of the time someone who is short is not trying to manipulate the markets. Shorts who naked short are just as bad as stock promoters promoting worthless paper. Both directions have bad apples.
Think about it with oil over $130 did it take a genius to figure out the airlines would get hurt? Did the shorts on the airlines cause the problems? NO! They just made money on it.
Same with the banks in the States, I bought SKF on the AMEX 2 weeks ago up $13 in the last 2 weeks. SKF is a ETF that goes up when the US financial go down. You really need to wake up, there is nothing wrong with shorting, in fact on the futures exchange there has to be a short for every long. Future would not exist with out shorts. As well a lot of CDN mutual funds have the ability to short a small percentage of their portfolios. Shorting and Put options can be used to insure your portfolio against loss, again, a sane individual would think this is a good thing.