You can critique and improve the country and community around you to improve it without associating with it.

That just reinforces the same problems but gives it a label that makes it easier to ignore the effects of your views on other people.

The better a place to live your country is, the more people would want to live there. And since it's a country, it will try to keep as many of them out as possible.

That seems like flawed logic to me. You cannot make a single country a better place to live without making the rest of the world less so. It is still a self- and community-centric view on the world.

that's a good way of putting it, Rod

Unfortunately it feels like my version of patriotism is a dying breed.

The way I always saw Nationalism vs Patriotism was that the first one allowes virtually no criticism while the later it is encounraged to critic and demand things from your country because you want it to be a better place to live